Student Fights University Over Plagiarism-Detector

(Maly) writes "CBC is reporting that MCGill University has lost a fight to have students first turn papers over to an anti-cheating website before handing them in to professors. The student refused to hand in three assignments to the service, received a zero on those assignments, then fought the ruling. The story doesn't have many specifics, such as the venue of the fight (court or some internal university tribunal), but it is an interesting case. As a recent graduate of the social sciences, I find that practice appalling. The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!). Although I don't like the idea, and I'm glad I never went through it, I suppose its analogue would be mandatory drug tests in sports."

Comments

Hrmm

[acehole]

Isnt that the job of lecturers/professors? They're supposed to know the material and recognise when something is copied.

What ever happened to trust?

Re:Hrmm

[epicstruggle]

With many profs. having hundreds of students, exactly where are they going to find the time to make sure your paper is an original. And TAs coming from overseas, I was happy if they could even speak english in the of chance that i need help. With this situation at hand, many have taken the easy route and cheated by searching/buying papers online.

I hope students are required to hand their papers in to anti-cheat sites, before hand. Hey Id like to make sure people are all getting a fair shake.

later,
epic

Re:Hrmm

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

In former times this was easy - you were marking papers from year to year and could easily remember plagiarised essays, or essays copied from one another within a year group - but with the advent of the internet, work can easily be disseminated over a wide geographical area.

On the other hand if you're talking about plagiarism of published works, then yes, tutors should be able to spot this. But I think we're talking about plagiarism of course essays rather than published papers. Of course, examination systems have laways got round this problem quite simply.

Re:Hrmm

[NoOneInParticular]

That's akin to saying manufacturing anything is a job for engineers: they're supposed to know the material and how to build stuff with it. Well, once the initial design is done, it's a lot more efficient to create a machine that does the manufacturing for you. We call this the industrial revolution.

As a former university teacher, I've never used this turnitin site, but I did use a 30-line python script that would take random fragments of 10 consecutive words in the papers and would run them (a) through google and (b) against all other papers that were turned in. This worked awesomely well and saved me a lot of time that I could spend on actually assessing the quality of the non-fraudulent papers.

Plagiarism simply happens and I don't see the problem with automated checking for it. Automating tasks that formerly needed insight, training, and knowledge might be called the information revolution.

Re:Hrmm

[tgibbs]

Isnt that the job of lecturers/professors? They're supposed to know the material and recognise when something is copied.

So professors are expected to be familiar with every recycled term paper that is going around on the internet or being sold by term paper mills?

In reality, professors are going to catch plagiarism only if the student happens to copy from a source that the professor is very familiar with. A system where some students get hauled before disciplinary hearings while many others who are doing the same thing get away with high grades hardly seems fair, either.

Unfortunately, students often get away with petty plagiarism all through college, and then move on to graduate school or professional careers where sources are more easily identified, and the penalty for plagiarism tends to be much heavier.

Teaching students what constitutes original scholarship is part of the legitimate mission of the university, so outlawing tools that enable professors to catch cheaters ultimately is harmful to the student.

Still, asking the student to submit his paper to an originality checker seems a bit like a slap in the face, and from a practical point of view, letting the students know just how their papers are going to be checked makes it easier for them to circumvent those measures. It would probably be better simply to inform the students that there papers will be checked for originality without telling them how.

Re:Hrmm

[mabhatter654]

It's the new fashion! Tell your customers/students/employees you don't trust them....AND...make them do the work of "proving" that they're not breaking the rules in some humilliating way.

After all, it's not like the students are paying customers of the University or something. Universities in general are actually WORSE than the *IAAs in terms of pre-emptively accusing people of wrongdoing...inspite of having a "mission" to educate and improve society, all they do anymore is integrate people into the pettiness of corperate culture!

Re:Hrmm

[DarkOx]

See there is a big difference between what you are doing and what the service is doing. You wrote a script to help you do your job. The only money you make off of it is your salary. The papers you get might be stored on your harddisk for future referance and checking but your not effectively using them as any sort of asset. If you were out there running ads "Over 5000 papers to varify against" and selling the service then it could be argued that you were using student papers to make money, becase the papers would be assets to your business. There is nothing wrong with automaticly checking for plagiarism there is something worng with you makeing money off work I did without my consent.

Re:Hrmm

[NoOneInParticular]

I could, in principle. I've lost the script that used the google API to do this, but still have the original one that would post HTML and parse google's result. Unfortunately, it ceased working, as google currently seems to check user agents or whatever and dissallows the script as a flagrant violation of their terms of service... which it is. I don't think it is wise to hack around this (which should be perfectly doable) as it's illegal.

If there's any interest in this, it would be fairly easy to set it up to use the Google API and make it a small sourceforge project. It seems that if users of the script obtain a valid API key such a script does not violate Google's TOS for the API.

The one that checks for occurances in other papers is so easy (using a python dictionary) that I leave that as an excercise for the reader :-)

Re:Hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Your implied economic argument is too simplistic. Say, for the sake of argument, that you are a student at this university, and that you are a plagiarist. The university is also protecting its other students (and itself) from the results of your cheating by trying to determine wheter or not you have committed plagiarism. If they fail to do so, you could well end up out in the real world having faked your way through part or all of your university education. This devalues the degree you and your classmates received, which harms them. It also harms the reputation university in question, so they are unable to attract the caliber of students they did in the past.

And, contrary to what you might think, it does not take a huge public scandal for this sort of devaluing to occur. I work for a large investment bank and there are several schools that my fellow development managers and I simply discount when screening new hires straight out of college, simply based on experiences we have collectively had in the past with other students from those schools.

As a paying customer, you should be glad your school cares as much as this one (if your school does, and if you are in school). Your dissatisfaction might be better focused on the fact that students are being asked to hand over original works to a for-profit institution with no compensation. That was the crux of the student's complaint in the article as well.

Re:Hrmm

[Illserve]

It's the new fashion! Tell your customers/students/employees you don't trust them....AND...make them do the work of "proving" that they're not breaking the rules in some humilliating way.

The best way for students to prove that they're not breaking the rules, in this case, is to actually do the damned work. We're fortunate that it's become so easy to catch plagiarizers, a method that catches most of the offenders and produces no more false positives than convential methods.

Good students should be applauding this, because now their honest effort won't be in the shadow of someone's $35 store bought paper written by a poor grad student.

Re:Hrmm

[GigsVT]

Because we all know that software to recognize patterns in text is perfect. That's why no one ever gets spam anymore!

Re:Hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afriad trust went out the window about the 50th time someone tried to pass someone else's work off as their own in one of my assignments.

OK lets do some maths here...at the university at which I am a lecturer the average academic has 12 teaching contact hours a week (research, administration, student consultation etc are additional to this). Lets assume that lecturer gives 2 lecturers per week (4 hours). Lets knock a couple of hours off for unit coordination, or other time allowances etc and say that the staff member has 6 1 hour tutorials. Each tutorial has 30 students. That means there are 6x30 (180) potential assignments. Lets call it 150 since some students might not submit assignments for various reasons or they may have extensions and submit the assignment later. Lets say the assignment is a 3000 word report. That means that the staff member has to read 450,000 words, not including direct quotes, appendices etc that are not included in word counts. Just to put that into perspective, according to http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/15/new.po tter/, its roughly the equivelent of reading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights almost 4 times and not much less that reading the entire Old Testment of the Bible.

Lets say that it takes 1/2 hour to mark a report that does not have any plagiarism issues. That means that 75 hours will be spent marking these assignments alone (assuming non-stop marking with no breaks). According to various decision makers in the university, assignments need to be returned to students in 2 weeks (Try reading the Old Testment of the Bible in 2 weeks). This means that in addition to normal hours the lecturer has to find an extra 75 hours over 2 weeks. When we detect plagiarism in a report, we are usually very thorough in its investigation so that if it comes to an appeal, the Is are dotted and the Ts are crossed. This can easily take 2-3 hours per plagiarised assignment (not including time spent later interviewing the student).

This means the staff member has a few options;

1) pretend the plagiarism doesn't exist. However this has the effect of devaluing the univeristy's degrees as employers are wary about employing gradutes when they've had a bad experience in the past. The reputation of a University can be very important and easily lost.

2) Reduce the time spent with dealing with plagiarised assignments through automated plagiarism detection tools. This does not eliminate the time spent on the problem. We never rely solely on the output of an automated tool, beacuse we understand that they generate false positives. However it does take some of the leg work out of it.

3) Spend less time assessing the assignments from students that have done the right thing and done the assignment without plagiarising. In my opinion this is not a good option. I belive that we need to protect the students that do the right thing.

4) Not meet the deadline. Not the best career move.

So no, I don't think it is the job of a lecturer top check for plagiarism. It is something that I shouldn't have to do. When students submit an assignment they sign a cover page which states that any non-original material has been appropriately acknowledged.

Having said all of this, personally I'm not a fan of web based plagairism detection services. I would much rather have a local tool that can check submitted assignments against themselves and a search engine, so that the University maintains control of the assignments.

Re:Hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

this should never be manditory. this is the same as saying, ok dude...i know you spent a week on that project but give it to me so i can make money and you get nothing.

i agree with the student. this is tantamount to saying that all students are cheating. it treats like as if they are dishonest when in reality it may be only a half dozen or so per 100.

secondly...the kid is also right to object to give a website free content that they will use to make money off of without some sort of compensation on his end.

i remember busting my chops on 40-50 page papers on comparative governments and i'll tell you, those weeks that i'd spend working on them was for my benefit not some website.

Re:Hrmm

[jeffkjo1]

I agree with the grandparent poster here, and I think most other posters are missing a valid point (one that I hear one the first day of nearly every class I have ever been in.)

It goes something like this:
"I will know if you cheat. I will catch you. I may miss it the first time, I may miss it the second time, but I will catch you. If you turn in one paper, and then in your second paper, the setence structure and word usage are completely different, I will know something is up. I keep all copies of all of your in class and out of class writing assignments, so it's easy to compare. I've been teaching here for X years, and I was once a student too, don't think I don't know all of the tricks."

Professors aren't idiots (and they have also been able to throw words and phrases into search engines for just as long as students have been able to find papers the same way.)

Even if you have one professor that doesn't catch you, the next one probably will.

Re:Hrmm

[geekdoc]

As an undergraduate, I actually sat on the Honor Board at a major US college. We were in charge of charging, investigating, and adjudicating honor code violations, including plagiarism, and we could not have done our job without turnitin.com.

Today, there is such a multitude of information on every subject known to mankind on the internet that it is nearly impossible to know them all. Also, cheating and plagiarism are epidemic (anywhere from 40-50% of students admit to "serious cheating" on at least one writing assignment), making those who do cheat a much larger percentage of the population than those who download illegal music. While sending everyone's papers through turnitin might be overkill (since most professors can tell when someone's paper just doesn't sound right), unless you have something to hide, you shouldn't have any problem with sending your papers through turnitin.

It's not like getting frisked or questioned under bright interrogation lights. It doesn't even take any of your time because the school does it all for you. You give them your paper (which you do anyway), they send it in, and 24-72 hours later they get an e-mail response. Many more schools (or at least professors) could be doing this anyway and no one would ever know it. That hardly qualifies as humiliating.

If your school is known as being a haven for plagiarists, is anyone going to take your degree seriously? The old Reagan quote comes to mind: "Trust, but verify."

Re:Hrmm

[jandrese]

Wouldn't that merely tip the teacher off that you're up to something? Besides, why not just do your own work and try to learn something?

Re:Hrmm

[Frisky070802]

Mod parent insightful. The balance between the student's trust and the overall role of the school is tenuous, but the comment about how one can no longer rely on a teacher to identify every source of knowledge is quite valid.

I'd feel a lot better however if the service performing the analysis were non-profit, and also if it is known that it distills enough from each publication to identify duplication without being able to reproduce it (copyright issues).

Re:Hrmm

[TrentC]

Because we all know that software to recognize patterns in text is perfect. That's why no one ever gets spam anymore!

While funny, the problem with your argument is that spam gets through filters because the spammers don't seem to care one whit about formatting, presentation or a professional appearance, they just want the damn email in your inbox.

When a college student submits an essay titled:

"The Hist0ry of Pan-Afr]1can Con|flict In Resp0nse to the Amer*ican Slave Trade peterson butterfly tango"

that student has bigger problems then trying to foil an automated plagiarism checker.

Jay (=

Re: Hrmm

[bezuwork's friend]

... but with the advent of the internet, work can easily be disseminated over a wide geographical area.

I'm in law school. Plagarism there is quite serious, although I seem to recall a prior /. discussion that Senator Biden apparently plagarized a report and seems none the worse for it.

Those professors of mine that have discussed it have this to say (about plagerism from court decisions, at least): It used to be hard to detect plagarism, but now it is easy. They say they can tell when a student has plagerized, as the writing is just too polished, so they go online and type in some text and often can find the match.

I just don't know why anyone would even attempt to copy in this way as you can always cite to something, and thus make it's use proper. Alternatively, just talk to the professor or get the zero - the alternative is risk of expulsion. I believe schools can even recind degrees they've awarded if evidence of wrongdoing comes up.

Re:Hrmm

[NoOneInParticular]

I can see that the profit motive seem to be a problem. Remember however that the reason the papers are worth anything is because students have the tendency to copy them to save them the trouble of writing something on their own, and there's a market for plagiarism detection. Apart from that, they're worthless (generally speaking, some papers are good).

In effect, a company like Turnitin would only be interested in the student papers from universities that use their service, simply because students from the same university are much more likely to exchange papers without using the internet than with those from other universities. In the case the internet is used, Turnitin is perfectly capable of finding this information for itself, perfectly legit, because it is publically available.

The university that uses Turnitin when explicitly asked would undoubtedly allow Turnitin to use the univerity's entire archive for detecting plagiarism for *their* students. Maybe they would not allow it to be used for other university's students, I would doubt that however.

The point is however that there is very little worth (except maybe for advertising) in collecting papers from one university and trying to apply them to the next, unless these papers are available on the net, in which case they're freely available anyway. Concluding, I think the 'making money of the student's work' argument is far-fetched.

Re:Hrmm

[orthogonal]

I could, in principle. I've lost the script that used the google API to do this

Oh suuure, you lost it.

And it's just a coincidence that I found a word-for-reserved-word very similar script -- by searching Google. (It's on the site "Napkin Scribblings of Don Knuth, as submitted by janitors, waiters, and graduate students". )

Looks like you "forgot" to cite "your" work. This will go on your permanent record, young man.

Re:Hrmm

[sailor420]

Having said all of this, personally I'm not a fan of web based plagairism detection services. I would much rather have a local tool that can check submitted assignments against themselves and a search engine, so that the University maintains control of the assignments.

And therein lies the problem. I agree with you, the professors should have an easy way to check their students' papers for plaigerism. However, this solution should be an internal one, either built for or licensed to the university. The papers that these students wrote should not become the property of some third-party company to keep and make money off of--in fact, I suspect that practice could easily go against the honor codes that so many Universities implement.

Re:Hrmm

[Gumber]

I would hope and assume that positives are reviewed by a human before the student is accused of cheating, especially given that someone is supposed to be reading their essay anyway to grade it.

The economics of the situation are a little different with Spam.

Re:Hrmm

[dgatwood]

If it were 6/100, that might be a valid opinion. When the average is 20/100 (higher in some types of writing classes) who plagiarize part or all of at least one paper, however, it becomes clear that the quality of education is being adversely iimpacted.

Simply trusting the students is not a reasonable option. Schools have a reputation to uphold in the eyes of employers. If they start turning out graduates who claim to have taken a writing class but couldn't write a complete sentence to save their lives, employers will think twice before hiring their students in the future. That means students will not want to go there in the future, meaning fewer students and poorer quality students, leading to a never-ending spiral until eventually the university closes. I've seen universities go down that path, and it isn't pretty.

Those companies don't make money off your paper. They don't make a single penny more because your paper is on their servers. They make money because they provide an important service.

That having been said, doing this on final submission is the wrong way to solve the problem. The right way is to give the students the opportunity to revise the paper after such a submission and resubmit as often as desired. That way, they know they've been caught and can redeem themselves by doing the work themselves.

It also could provide a means for near real-time grammar and spelling advice, which is much a much better way to actually learn than simply getting back papers with red marks. If the purpose of teaching is to teach (rather than to simply deflate students' sense of self-worth as some teachers seem to believe :-| ), then this has a lot of potential....

Just my $0.02.

Re:Hrmm

[Jacob0531]

Guilty until proven innocent! Sounds fabulous!

No offense, but I could care less if students cheat. In the end they are only cheating themselves. The problem comes when these students enter the workforce and all the employers care about is their GPA and spend no time actually interviewing their potential candidates. A thorough interview and a good judge of character will weed out the slackers.

Kudos to the one employer I've had who truly had the ability to put together a great team. It was a sad day to see him leave.

Re:Hrmm

[crush]

Yeah, and then when you get caught you'll cry and appeal and threaten to sue the college and the professor will have to spend more of his valuable time which is already stretched thin proving that you're a dishonest f*ck who won't take no for answer and most professors don't like to deal with all that shit, so you'll get away with a plea-bargain from the Academic-"Integrity"-Board, or whatever newspeak term your university uses. Add to this that the administration of the university don't like students being caught cheating because then they have to expel them and then the university which is a business loses their fees. Add to this that lots of rich kids with no talent, no brains and no honesty want an easy university to hand them a piece of paper that says they graduated and you have the makings of a degraded education system.

Spare me all this special pleading about the students being "assumed innocent until proven guilty". If that were the case then TAs shouldn't be so nasty as to check out a suspiciously well-written passage, they shouldn't even consider it a possibility.

This is all about cheaters whining because they'll be caught more easily. I agree that it's exactly like drug-testing in athletics and as someone that's been involved in both academia and athletics and hasn't cheated I welcome the introduction of these tests.

Re:Hrmm

[dpm]

Speaking as a former assistant professor, I have no patience at all with past colleagues who complain about their students cheating. It is an easy matter to have students do their assignments incrementally, starting with bibliographical reports and oral presentations (with questions), where cheating is much more difficult, before handing in the written paper on the same topic.

If professors keep on assigning the same trite, tired topics year after year instead of taking the time to develop new ones, and simply rubber-stamp grades onto half-read papers instead of monitoring each student's progress, they are cheating as much as the students (and yes, I've taught classes with more than 100 students).

Re:Hrmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I took AP European History in High school. We had to write a ton of essays for that. I then went to college and took a couple more European History classes. Now, some of these college classes had essay assignments that were *exactly* like the ones I did in high school. Now, I did a good job on my high school essays, so I just turned some of those in. They were my original work, and I still knew the material good enough to re-write the essay if I had to.

Bam, second essay I turn in that I had written previously, I get called in. Turns out, my teacher thought that I had been plagarizing. He ran my papers through one of these databases, that my high school teacher had so conveniently submitted my papers to, and got a hit.

There was nothing I could do to convince my teacher I wasn't plagarizing. I was able to word for word recite passages and ideas out of my paper, from memory. Apparently that wasn't good enough. I almost lost two years of college education (plagarism annuls all the courses you have taken at this university) because of a stupid service like this one. Screw them. They aged me five years over worrying about whether re-submitting my own original work was going to ruin my future.

In other words, this is not full-proof and I pity the students who turn the same paper into more than one class, because you may just get screwed.

Re:Hrmm

[Nasarius]

I hope students are required to hand their papers in to anti-cheat sites, before hand. Hey Id like to make sure people are all getting a fair shake.

As a current university student (studying chemistry, though), I agree. It lowers the value and meaning of a degree if it's easy to get by cheating. Not to mention that you're screwing yourself over if you constantly cheat.

Re:Hrmm

[wkitchen]

Even if you have one professor that doesn't catch you, the next one probably will.

Given the number of highly credentialed incompetents that I've encountered, I'm not so sure about that.

Re:Hrmm

[fucksl4shd0t]

I hope students are required to hand their papers in to anti-cheat sites, before hand. Hey Id like to make sure people are all getting a fair shake.

So then, an environment in which everyone is assumed to be a cheater until proven otherwise by automated software is an environment that fosters trust, growth, and learning? Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. :) I didn't learn that one in a university...

Re:Hrmm

[Flagran]

Except they DO make money of my paper. They sell access to a database. Part of the reason that database has value is that it includes my paper.

Re:Hrmm

[Dashing Leech]

No offense, but I could care less if students cheat.

Why would anyone be offended by you caring if students cheat. Unless you meant you don't care, in which case you should have said, "I couldn't care less." (Don't feel bad, it seems about 50% of people get this saying wrong.)

Re:Hrmm

[tgibbs]

So then, an environment in which everyone is assumed to be a cheater until proven otherwise by automated software is an environment that fosters trust, growth, and learning?

It goes further than that. Shockingly, many schools are actually known to lock up exams before tests. Even supplies and audiovisual equipment are frequently kept under lock and key. Access to grade records over the internet requires a password. Clearly, they are assuming that everybody is a cheater and thief until proven otherwise....

Re:Hrmm

[fucksl4shd0t]

Colleges have a duty to certify an education. If you're cheating, you should be kicked out of at least the class, if not the college. My degree means nothing if you got yours by cheating, so it's unfair to me.

I'd call into question the credibility of any degree from any university in which it was possible to acquire a degree by cheating. If you attend such a university, you should probably consider looking for a different one.

In any case, the real world is a cutthroat place, not the sedentary university environment, like it or not. It's sink or swim out here in the real world, and cheating will sink you. So you don't have to worry about the guy cheating, because you'll have his job and more.

Assuming, of course, that your university hasn't developed a reputation for graduating cheaters because it was too easy. Checking for cheaters isn't the way to solve this problem. Make the course work hard enough that you *gasp* actually have to learn the material to get a degree. The point of college, and high school for that matter, is to get an education. If you can get a degree without getting an education, then the college failed. It's a fact that those folks running the college don't want to face up to, if they resort to forcing students to run their papers through a website before they can be graded.

As I've indicated in other posts in this article, it's my opinion that High School is ultimately to blame for this. Millions of kids every year are graduating HIgh School without the ability to read, write, and do basic math. Many of those kids go on to college, somehow. High School should've filtered them out, or provided them enough of an education that they didn't need to seek college education to do their jobs. College is supposed to be a place you go to learn a specialization, the depth of knowledge of which is required by the field is beyond the scope of High School. That's the purpose of college. If kids have to go to college to finish their basic education, then HIgh School has failed.

Re:Hrmm

[jadavis]

Most teachers have a policy against re-submitting work. The reason is usually that they are offended that they have taught you nothing you didn't know in High School. It's particularly offensive to these teachers when the old work is well-written and they can't tell the difference, because it really insults their entire career, and everything that they believe about the subject.

What you did was not plagarism, but it probably was against policy. It surprises me that there was no name attached to the original work. I suppose you could do something like officially copyright your work as you turn it in, so that there's no question that you wrote it.

If your H.S. teacher turned it in without your permission, it may have been a violation of copyright law. You could actually sue to get the paper removed from the database (although since you submitted it in college, and presumably agreed that it would be turned in to the service, it would probably be replaced in the database).

Re:Hrmm

[McAddress]

And, frankly, it's damn easy to fake knowing the material in a small class discussion environment. You can sound pretty damn insightful even if you don't know the material for shit.

sounds exactly like slashdot!

Re:Hrmm

[holt]

I was TAing a programming course where the assignments changed every year as much as possible, and because of the demands of the course, there were assignments every week, each TA had 90 students, and there were 1500 people in the class.
I caught people handing in the same assignment in the same class with only a few changes, and sometimes not even a few changes. Still, this takes time, especially when we're supposed to do all the work in a mere 6 hours of grading per week (it was a half-time appointment, and the other 14 hours of it are already accounted for).

If the people were doing those programming assignments in groups, they were undoubtedly learning the material better than you could have taught them otherwise, because talking problems out and solving them as a team (where you have to make sure everyone knows what's going on) leads to better understanding. On the other hand, if they weren't actually doing the work, didn't they go on to fail the tests?

Most of the programming classes I've taken have been smart enough to say "ok, work in groups, everyone can turn in a copy of your group's work, and put everyone's name on it" for precisely this reason. I don't feel sorry for your group for having cheating problems when it was really entirely your fault.

If you don't give homework on it, you might as well not teach it (with programming stuff, where practice is everything), so this is a material-in-the-course question.

I disagree with this as well. Why not give out practice assignments and say "do this if you want, but if you don't, you'll most likely not understand what's going on and you'll fail the exam(s)" If people do the assignments, have office hours to help with any questions. Don't feel bad about failing the people that don't do any work and consequentially don't understand any of the material.

The goal of an education is not to do a requisite amount of work, leading to a degree. The goal is to learn the requisite knowledge, leading to a degree. If the students can learn the material without doing the assignments, good for them. Most will have to do the assignments before they'll really get it. But if the students really DO know the material without jumping through your hoops, you should be happy for them and move on to the next student without getting upset that the student didn't have to do enough work to get it.

There is a ridiculous amount of busy work in the American education system, and it's because educators have lost focus on the real goal, believing that it's the work that matters instead of the knowledge.

SCO

[roguerez]

Has SCO used this to run Linux through it yet?

Re:SCO

[RealProgrammer]

Yes. They found that Linux is 100% plagiarized from material found at www.kernel.org.

their crawler

[Neophytus]

It's been poking about a few times, and at least it appears to obey robots.txt and use anti-hammer tricks unlike another IP rights company (albeit tagged to another market altogether) cyveillance who use false user agents to hide their activity, don't look for robots.txt and can sometimes hammer your entire website off the web if you have a low cap (say daily rather than monthly). Kudos to people who build polite bots. Have they been crawling your site?

Damn stright!

[PatrickThomson]

Technology is seen as infallible by a great many people - suppose a paper accidentally failed the pagiarism test - is there any way to appeal? who are you going to beleive, some snot-nosed plagiarising punk or a godlike magical website?

Re:Damn stright!

[John Harrison]

I am sure that the results aren't a simple numeric score. It would have to come back with a list of passages that were copied and where they were copied from.

Re:Damn stright!

[sangreal66]

I've had to turn papers into turnitin.com before. You do get a score, but it specifically points out the parts that were copied, along with their source. Teachers _have_ to check it, because it will count quoted passages as plagiarism.

Re:Damn stright!

[gl4ss]

well it didn't smell like the student was pissed off about that. he was pissed off about that his work would be instantly inserted into the database, a database held by a company for PROFIT - he would be so required by a (state run?) university - to give profit to a private company that's only claim to that profit would be those hundreds of essays inserted into it(and possibly some holes in their license, and no you are not exactly 'required' to give profit to book sellers, you don't _have_ to buy books to get by in an university, I should know - access to those books may be vital though, or equivalent books, and some custom course material might be necessary but that is usually provided with not-for profit pricing).

besides.. if you're plagiarising.. why wouldn't you go through the small extra effort of restructuring the sentences and paragraphs? making the essay essentially 'your own' in style(it would be extremely hard after that to decide with a machine if it was plagiarised or not). getting the information(and guessing what the prof wants there to be in the text) in the first place is the biggest bitch anyways and not the actual writing.

Re:Damn stright!

[Echnin]

Well, a rule of thumb is that if you have 3 or more consecutive words identical to the source, and they are not part of or make up a specific term, then you should consider revising it.

That's according to a certain Associate Professor who checks papers for plagiarism all the time. Specifically, my mother.

Re:Damn stright!

[arose]

Well, a rule of thumb is that if you have 3 or more consecutive words identical to the source

That is nice.

Re:Damn stright!

[lordgert]

Or imagine the student who submits his paper to the site, it gets identified as plagiarism by their real-time system, and it offers the student a better paper from their database flagged clean for just $19.99!

Some things it seems pointful to note

[rark]

1. This is in Canada, not the U.S. (/. is pretty US-centric, so it seems important to note this)

2. The article does note that, in addition to being used at 29 schools in Canada, it's used in 'several' schools in the U.S. Anyone know of any?

Well how can they safeguard against this?

[thenerd]

My father works as a professor in a large university, and has often had problems with students turning in plagiarised work.

One day he had to bring someone into his room to tell them that in future, it wasn't advisable to plagiarise from his own book and hand it right back into him, because he could recognise his own style!

With essays that can be purchased over the internet, why shouldn't McGill safeguard against having crap, plagiarized work handed into them? The students who do this are trying to decieve the university. The article seemed to be saying that the professors were trying to just get out of doing work, and it wasn't to catch cheaters. I don't see why it is wrong to know within a reasonable margin of error that the work you are marking is not plagiarized.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[digital photo]

If the intent is to protect against cheaters, then the teachers should submit the papers to the service for verification. The student should not have to be the one who is being required to turn in their papers to a service.

It is a matter of being treated like a criminal first.

The other problem would be false positives when people write with similar styles in two different parts of the nation/world. Given enough "samples" in their filter, the accuracey drops because you now have a much higher likelihood of turning up a match.

I Agree that plagiarizing work is wrong. But I do not agree that everyone should be treated like a cheater just because some in the student body are.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly why automated plagiarism checks make sense: If it's similar enough to be flagged by a text comparison program, then you're not showing that you learned something, just that you know CTRL-C CTRL-V. You're not expected to come up with the next uncertainty principle, but being able to explain something in your own words is a requirement, because it shows a) that you understood it and b) that you can give structure to complex thoughts. The latter will be very helpful should you ever have an original thought of your own.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[NoOneInParticular]

The other problem would be false positives when people write with similar styles in two different parts of the nation/world. Given enough "samples" in their filter, the accuracey drops because you now have a much higher likelihood of turning up a match

Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing? Just take this particular post apart and feed ten consecutive words through google and see how many hits you get.

Also, take a fairly generic sentence such as "to improve writing and research skills, encourage collaborative online learning" and try to find out where I got it from.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[Diamon]

It is a matter of being treated like a criminal first.

Yeah, how dare they.

While we're at it I think it is an invasion of my rights to be treated like a criminal by having to pass through a metal detector in order to enter a federal court house. Also we need to do away with police laser/radar guns because the police have already decided to treat me as a criminal by checking my speed. Oh and background checks for handguns, wtf? I'm no criminal I should be allowed to by a gun no questions asked and no waiting period. Anti-theft devices in stores, same thing. Security cameras, ditto. Also I particularly dont care for my neighbors having locks on their doors, they trying to say I'm a thief and am going to steal their stuff as soon as their backs are turned?

We can no longer endure these indignancies. Don't they know we should all be treated as infallible saints until we can be proven otherwise.

Oh and the whole being arrested and then having to defned yourself in court is a sham to. They should have to prove my guilt before even being allowed to arrest me. How dare they!

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[mabhatter654]

Bingo! It's not a matter of the student contesting the check, but the professor not accepting the students work UNTIL the STUDENT certified it as checked...that's just wrong. It's too bad there's no way for the students to go after the tenure [isn't that the ultimate irony...tenured profs accusing students of being lazy!] of profs like this!

But you are right, once everybody starts submitting silly reports to services, the system will flood and EVERYBODY WILL BE PLAGIRIZING! A good student response would be to collect older papers [like the professor's school papers!] and submit them to services as well...let's see if any of the "pushers" of the system are guilty too! For a matter of fact that should be a new requirement to keep tenure...all profs entire body of work [pre-K to PHD] should be submitted to these services...and if they can't pass....

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[TCaptain]

The article seemed to be saying that the professors were trying to just get out of doing work, and it wasn't to catch cheaters. I don't see why it is wrong to know within a reasonable margin of error that the work you are marking is not plagiarized.

I live in Montreal and attend Concordia, so I've heard quite a bit about this case. There were two main principles at issue here:

1 - The fact that students were presumed guilty until proven innocent (ie: ALL students were treated as plagiarists and had to prove otherwise or get zero).

and (and this is a biggie)

2 - Copies of the student's work submitted to the service were kept and included into its database...students had no say in the future use of their work, they either had to give up rights to it in favor of the service (so they could add it to their database and use it to make money) or refuse, not use the service and get zero.

As near as I can tell the student, nor any of the people supporting him, had no problem with using the service as a tool...only to the conditions of using it and the fact that it was used before any suspicion of plagiarism existed.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[TGK]

Speaking as an alum, the peice of paper hanging on my wall carries with it the prestige and reputation of the University I attended. That prestige is derived from the quality of students that university graduates, and in my case, the broad knoledge base graduates demonstrate. That broad knoledge base is in large part a result of those Gen Ed Requirements you speak so poorly of.

When students cheat and dodge assignments, they diminish the intelectual level of graduates my University produces. They also diminish the moral character of the pool of graduates. In short, my degree is rendered less valuable by the actions of students years down the road who are too short signted to appreciate the benefits of an education.

I don't think it's right to force the students to submit their papers to an automated system to check for plagirism themselves, it just seems rude. I do think students should be required to submit electronic versions of their papers to professors at all times, and that the professors should be strongly encouraged to use electronic tests for plagerism.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[DavidBrown]

If the intent is to protect against cheaters, then the teachers should submit the papers to the service for verification. The student should not have to be the one who is being required to turn in their papers to a service.

Maybe the school is giving the students a break. Let them submit their own essays for validation. If they fail validation, the student can rework his essay and do it again until the essay manages to pass validation. This way, you don't have a situation where the school subjects a student to discipline for plagarism - allowing a student to learn a lesson without being punished with reduced grades, etc.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[Orne]

Of the 5 sources offered by Google:

the first is the press release sheet of the original site, Turnitin (turn-it-in)

one is a project proposal by an IT company that offers to install Turnitin at schools in australia. It appears they use the press release to describe the product

three are schools that have implemented Turnitin, and have "appropriated" a paragraph of the press release to link back to Turnitin's main site

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[Jonny_Haircut]

Why did this get modded up?

It is a matter of being treated like a criminal first.

First of all, plagarism isn't a criminal offence, or really anything like one. It's an acedemic offence. I don't know how you could possibly come to be so outraged. Second, if you RTFA, you'll see that McGill is using "TurnitIn.com" on a limited trial basis.

Additionally, some people have raised the point that it is somehow wrong that a company get access to these students works. I don't know how it works at most schools, but I'm a Canadian university student (from Ontario, that big province next to Quebec - where McGill is) and at my school, it is expressly stated in many places that all work submitted for classes is the sole property of the University. If they want to sell it, hey, its their right. Not that there have in the past been many cases where there was much commercial value to an undergrads course work.

Which brings me to my next point: This kid is being a whiny little snot. Did you see his picture? He looks like a scruffy little Che wannabe. He should be happy that there is even a tiny commercial demand for his work, such as it is. (Note: He got B's and C's on the papers mentioned. Yes, the schoold did in fact agree to re-evaluate his papers after originally giving him zeroes.) And look who he's backed up by: The Canadian Federation of Students. I'm not sure if its the same everywhere, but Student Fedrations in Canada are notoriously leftist, overreacting, and nearly if not completely dysfunctional organizations. Look at their quote:

From the article: "The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.

"...Really isn't about catching cheaters"!!?? For their TRIAL use of the program which they PAY FOR!? Does anyone actually believe that this is some kind of conspiracy to a) make money, or b) somehow trample on the poor little student? Are they accusing the system of marking students papers without looking at them? This is simply a huge overreaction, although very characteristic and not at all surprising

This whole thing nothing but a case of trying to stop what is actually a very large and very real problem in acedemia, particularly at the undergrad level. I for one am thankful that they are taking serious steps to address the issue, instead of ignoring it.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Ah, so it is just like this CAPS II bullshit actually makes it easier for terrorists to get on airplanes because they now have the chance to do test runs until they find people who can pass the system without extra scrutiny.

Since the student is submitting to the plagarism detector himself, he can plagarize, then tweak then test and if it fails the test, he can tweak it some more until eventually it passes the plagarism test. Since he now has the official stamp of approval from the infallible computer - there is no need for a human to check for plagarism.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[po8]

As a University professor with a goodly collection of published academic papers, I assure you that publishing in the academic world does not work like submitting to this "anti-cheating" service.

The typical agreement between an academic and a publisher gives an exclusive right to publish the copyrighted work to the publisher. These days, that exclusive right is often time-limited and/or limited to allow the author to self publish online. In any case, the publisher is almost never given the copyright itself, or given permission to go do arbitrary things with the work other than publish it in specified ways.

Note also that the author is giving the academic publisher the exclusive right to use the work in return for a benefit: the publication of the work. The "anti-cheating" service provides no such benefit to the student: they are being asked to give up their rights in return for the possibility of being falsely accused of plagiarism. Hardly a reasonable bargain. In fact, again IANAL but I think an excellent case could be made under contract law that there is no binding contract, due to no consideration to each side.

I would refuse to publish in a forum with a copyright agreement like that of this "anti-cheating" service; I share the concerns of the students in this area.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[rcw-home]

Hell, not checking for plagiarism is unfair to those not cheating

Is learning a competitive contest?

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[fulldecent]

How does the system handle quoting and paraphrasing, where credit is given? I'm can only guess it doesn't.

That, and the fact that the fact that the English language only ~12 bits of entropy per word(1), it's very likely a birthday attack will be pulled against this database.

(1) http://www.stanford.edu/~vjsriniv/project/entropy_ of_english_9.htm

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[xanthan]

You've never graded programs, have you? When a professor (or more often, a TA) has 60 programs turned in, each easily being hundreds if not a thousand lines long, there is no way the person is going to make any serious headway on the matter. At best, the grader can guess about what students tend to group together in class and use that as a heuristic. Of course if there are three sections, each with 30 students, and there are friends between sections... well, forget it.

The (very, very sad) reality is that there is a disguesting amount of cheating that is happening in Computer Science programs. It is a genuine concern of professors to have to worry about this. The fact there there is enough demand to warrant a company to check on it should tell you something.

The year before I became a TA for an operating systems course, my school had to give up on NACHOS (Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System) as part of the cirriculum. There were too many full source implementations sitting on the net that were getting turned in as homework assignments. I ended up changing the program to use Linux with assinments revolving around kernel hacking. The sad thing is that I think the students learned less than if they had used NACHOS since NACHOS allowed them to experience all facets of the operating system from the ground up versus the Linux assignments that had to be a lot more focused. (The lessons I learned from having done NACHOS in '94 I still use today.)

The assertion that cheat checkers don't work well with homework assignments is true for small enough units of code, the kind found in introductory courses. Even then, you'd be surprised at how different 30 people can write the same simple program. Cheat checkers used in those classes generate several false positives per assignment that usually get human review. One match between another student is usually tagged as a "whatever", the second gets noticed... three or four in a row of the same two or three students and you have a real problem. Legit submissions that hit false positives usually match different students on the second and third try. By the time assignments get into second year CS programs, assignments are several hundred lines long and usually are sufficiently different to not get matched at all from different implementations. Third year assignments and any matches are immediately suspicious.

In general, professors use cheat checkers as a tool to identify trends. Final decisions are made by the professors themselves -- they're CS grads, they know that cheat checkers aren't perfect. A few hits and you usually get a meeting with a prof with a few questions. If you know the material and can explain the code, you're fine. You'd be amazed at the number of people that get into that situation and can't explain the code one bit.

In the end, the real losers in this are the students that don't cheat. Not having mastered the art of deception and taking others people work and claiming it their own, those who have been honest end up not making as much money or getting as far with their careers. Those that have mastered deception are the ones that become your Pointed Haired Bosses and lie to you. Funny how that works...

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[kbielefe]

Is learning a competitive contest?

Learning isn't, but school is. Especially grad school and upper division undergrad. Cheaters in a class artifically inflate the curve. This is one of the reasons that I don't like school. The very fact that plagiarism is possible annoys me. I would rather be creating something original that couldn't be plagarised even if I wanted to.

You can argue that grades don't matter much in the real world, but I have at least one counter example. Two people I know both graduated with engineering degrees at the same time. They both had 2 internships in their field (one in common) and did the same extracurricular activities. The main difference was in their GPAs.

One couldn't find a job by graduation time so he went to grad school for 2 years at a research assistant's salary. The other chose his dream job from multiple offers and went to work a month after graduation, taking grad school classes at night with his company paying for tuition. When the first finally finished grad school, it took him another 6 months to find a job he loves, and he still makes 10 thousand a year less than the other even though he has a Master's degree and the second guy is still slowly working on his.

In a better economy, the disparity may not have been so evident, but the bottom line is one guy has more home equity, more savings, less debt, and a few more fun vacations under his belt all because of less than 1 point difference in GPA. It will take the other guy quite a while to catch up.

Now, I agree that if the guy with better grades had cheated to get them, the other guy would catch up a lot quicker when job performance is what mattered most. But it would have still hurt him in the short term. Cheaters may not be hurting anyone but themselves in high school, but they can affect you financially after college.

Re:Well how can they safeguard against this?

[Jerf]

Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing?

It's a relative thing.

If you're checking for word-for-word plagarism, which a lot of plagarism is and is worth checking, you're right that the odds of a false positive is fairly low as long as you're checking for long enough phrases.

The bad part comes when you say, "Well, the students have figured out how to re-phrase the ideas so the word-for-word checker doesn't work so well. Let's abstract the concepts out and check for those."

Then you start getting into false positive land. The crazier the students get, the looser your concept matches get, the greater the chances of a false positive.

It's a trade-off, and as is often the case, no machine learning technique can really stand up to a determined human attacker's attempt to get an arbitrarily-choosable piece of data misclassified. Eventually the human forces the machine learning algorithm to be so loose it's impossible for the algorithm to really "say" anything about a given input. That's when you get false positives.

It's a tradeoff, and with human attackers, the machines inevitably lose. That's one reason these things are only useful for tools; the professor must not trust these above their own judgement.

Anti-cheating detectors are good

[October_30th]

We use anti-cheating detectors too. Why? Because a) cheating is wrong and should be punished, b) the process is fair - everyone flagged by the algorithm gets a chance to explain him/herself to me.

Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good

[October_30th]

Education is about learning, maybe you forgot that

Since when did plagiarising become learning? Learning is taking existing material and working on it to produce new thought, ideas and interpretations.

Sure, you can have long explicit quotes but you must mark them as such. If the anti-cheating detectors flags you for such a paragraph, there's no problem if I can see that you've actually contributed to the report. If there's a real problem with the material, I will still give you a chance to explain yourself to me. I don't see what's the problem here. There are plenty of safeguards in place - no-one gets rejected because "an algorithm said the work is a copy".

We have a problem with otherwise underachiving students turning in word-for-word copies of old high-grade reports. The clever ones will try to modify the wording slightly, change the layout or the figures to confuse the examiners. Bayesian filters will still flag those.

Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good

[Geccie]

Reverse the order - 1) the process is fair - everyone flagged by the algorithm gets a chance to explain him/herself to me. 2) cheating is wrong and should be punished. Your argument falls apart for the following reason: It is only fair if you are adept at verbally defending yourself. This is much akin to the argument that the poor get shafted in court. They are not capable of defending themselves. eg "I dint have nuthin to do with it". If you cant mount a good enough defense, you lose. What you have done is wrong and therefore should be punished. If you have ever been falsely accused of plagarism, murder, etc, you might have a different perspective. Just because an offense can provide punishment does not mean it must - bitchtard

Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good

[tomstdenis]

I think if you are found copying non-trivial sections of another work without crediting it then you ought to learn quickly how to defend yourself.

Also for masters and PhD programs you have to routinely defend your work as a matter of course.

Sure if the student has a disability they should have some other course [say, appeal in writing, have a spec.ed councellor, etc...]

Tom

Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good

[October_30th]

So are you proposing that I shouldn't check for plagiarism because some people might be falsely accused and might not be able to defend themselves?

I don't dismiss anyone's work as plagiarised unless I can prove it. If I can prove, there's really not much you can do about it no matter how skilled a verbal acrobat you are.

The point of the whole exercise is to confront the student, make it clear that as far as I can see his work is plagiarised and that I can prove it to the disciplinary board if necessary. He will fail the course this year, but has two options in the future: 1) he can take the course again next year with no prejudice from my part; the disciplinary board will not be informed of the incident, 2) he can take me and my evidence to the board right now and let them decide.

Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good

[Geccie]

"So are you proposing that I shouldn't check for plagiarism because some people might be falsely accused and might not be able to defend themselves?" "I don't dismiss anyone's work as plagiarised unless I can prove it. If I can prove, there's really not much you can do about it no matter how skilled a verbal acrobat you are." -- Here you say that _you_ dont qualify the work as plagarism unless you can _prove_ it. That is quite a high standard. Others I have seen do not follow your high moral standards as I have seen myself. As you know, It is oft difficult to prove a negative assertion. It is far less difficult to prove someone cheated than to prove you did not! When papers contain many matching paragraphs, it is pretty cut and dried. That is not what I am addressing. Those arguing in favor of these methods overlook the possibility that a probability scale exists. If you will note, UCB did not feel this program was appropriate to use at their own university.

As a professor....

[abbamouse]

I have two takes on this story. First, I do find it a bit offensive to presume cheating on the part of students and to require them to "prove" they didn't cheat rather than the burden of proof running the other way. I do believe that if you expect certain behavior from people and let them know your expectations, then they are more likely to confirm them. This is the same reason that I find the anti-cheating posters in our classrooms at Wright State University offensive -- students know they aren't supposed to cheat, so the posters just create the impression that it's a pervasive part of the academic experience.

Second, that little quip about financial compensation is completely off-base. Students pay to learn, and once the prof has decided that they'll have a better learning experience if they submit to the site (presumably because they will feel forced to think for themselves instead of copying from term paper mills) they have no "right" to compensation. The practice is offensive, but from an educational standpoint, it is little different than the professor using their papers in class as examples for others. Either way, other people benefit from the student's work without compensation for the student. That's the way education works. The fact that antiplagiarism sites make money from their line of business (and the examples submitted by the students) is of no import, as long as they aren't selling the essays as part of an anthology or something. It's a feedback loop within the educational process and even though I disapprove of the practice, nobody's "rights" are violated.

Re:As a professor....

[PrionPryon]

I disagree with your second statement. Two points, one a niggling one and another that is less so. a) The system doesn't work against paper mills because the output of a paper mill is new content, that's why it is a mill. b) Students have a decent arguement in saying that they own the material within a paper they write (an original one) and the fact that the system indexes their content if it is deemed legitimate (assuming there is no option to opt out) means the company is bolstering its product without due compensation. The papers i write are my property. They are given to a professor for a grade but even the professor does not have a right to show it as an example without my permission. Reproduction without prior consent, and due compensation, is listed in the cover of most (scientific) journals.

Re:As a professor....

[WanderingGhost]

First, I do find it a bit offensive to presume cheating on the part of students and to require them to "prove" they didn't cheat

I agree. But it's certainly better than jsut letting students develop the idea that "researching a subject" means "doing a google search". (And in Brazil, where I teach, the words "research", that we use in assignments and "search", for google are the same, "pesquisa").
But anyway... Students also need to learn not to take offense. Hey, ti's the rules. Are they offended because they have to take tests? No. It's better to learn the right attitude towards tests and systems like this than just complaining that it presumes the student didn't learn. I took a great course on Compiler Construction here... And we all had to suybmit our assignments to an automated system designed by the teacher - and no students had a problem with it.

Re:As a professor....

[Anonymous Coward]

Second, that little quip about financial compensation is completely off-base. Students pay to learn, and once the prof has decided that they'll have a better learning experience if they submit to the site (presumably because they will feel forced to think for themselves instead of copying from term paper mills) they have no "right" to compensation.

You really miss the point. When I write an essay, I own the copyright. I give my prof a copy of my essay when I hand it in , but copyright ownership remains with me. I am free to sell my essay, publish it in a book, a newspaper or a journal, not the prof or university.

Giving a copy of the essay to a third party which will use that copy to make money violates copyright law and opens the prof, the university and turnitin.com to legal liability.

The practice is offensive, but from an educational standpoint, it is little different than the professor using their papers in class as examples for others.

Actually, there is a world of difference. The situation you described is allowed by copyright law. Forcing students to give a copy to a for-profit company without compensation is not.

Re:As a professor....

[Tim C]

The papers i write are my property.

That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.

Re:As a professor....

[theLOUDroom]

That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.

Why on earth is this modded up?

NO COLLEGE DOES THIS!

(Look at the other replies.) Even if it did, I doubt it would hold up in court. It would be like the electric company demanding you give them all your copyrights, or you get no power. No judge would stand for it, and there already regulations on these organizations which typically prohibit such ridiculous abuses of power.

Re:As a professor....

[Hatta]

You mean /. ran the same story more than once? Shocking. Maybe they need some sort of duplication detector.

Re:As a professor....

[0x0d0a]

The fact that antiplagiarism sites make money from their line of business (and the examples submitted by the students) is of no import, as long as they aren't selling the essays as part of an anthology or something.

The problem is that they can change their license at any time.

If their license stipulated that (a) upon dissolution of the company, all paper rights will be forfeited, (b) the paper rights may not be sold, (c) the paper rights are for exclusive use in detecting cheating, and (d) the license is nonexclusive (perhaps there's a generic email address that reports can be sent to to be entered into *all* the anticheating services, so that they recieve no business benefit in owning the paper as property -- only the academic communit as a whole really does -- then I'd be interested in seeing if folks still object).

I don't think that there are many legitimate concerns that the anticheating company could raise. The professor doen't have to do significantly more work. At least some of the students' concerns are addressed.

Nothing New

[Pike65]

Our department at uni used to run all of the submitted coding assignments in the first year through a script that would normalise the ident style, remove the comments and change all the variables names so they they could be diffed to check for cheating.

No-one threw their rattle out of their pram then.

I mean, how is this different from someone doing it manually?

Re:Nothing New

[AKnightCowboy]

Our department at uni used to run all of the submitted coding assignments in the first year through a script that would normalise the ident style, remove the comments and change all the variables names so they they could be diffed to check for cheating.

That's kind of unfair considering with most first-year assignments if they DIDN'T look similar then the student probably did the assignment wrong. At least most of our first year programming assignments were very simple things and we were expected to use similar structures to the concepts we learned in class to accomplish it. As a result, I would be amazed if your little cheating detector didn't pick out 90% of the class as copying off of each other. It's not because we were cheating, we were following the professor's mandated coding style.

Reply

[Mod Me God]

Anything that calls itself a science in practice isn't.

er... how about science: "Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study" or "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena"??? Or are you just small minded?

The website says "Originality Reports are exact duplicates of submitted papers, except that any text either copied or paraphrased appears underlined, color-coded, and linked to its original source." [they check against the internet, academic papers and past submitted reports].

When a subject is quite tightly defined, there must be a limit of permutations/combinations in text. I don't like the idea of this system, but would like to know where they draw the line regarding paraphrasing - is a sentence, paragraph, larger? Is it only exact paraphrasing that is detected or can adjectives be sprinkled about?

Technically interesting, but the false-positive risk is worrying.

There is an important upside to the system

[WanderingGhost]

I am a teacher... And you guys wouldn't believe how much stuff students just copy from the Internet, or from other students.
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).

Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive. :-(

Re:There is an important upside to the system

[digital photo]

Students are subject to peer pressure. Everyone is subject to it. But if your classmate cheats, that doesn't mean that you will too. Granted, where one's view differs on this is dependant on one's belief/trust/faith in other humans.

I have nothing against the service itself. I have nothing against schools using it as a screening method to flag potentially problematic papers.

I have a problem with the institution making the students be the ones to submit their works to have it validated.

What does that teach a student? That they are not trusted. That their teachers have no faith in their character.

While this might catch a few cheaters, it stands a high chance of souring good students to do good work.

If a good student gets flagged, is that added to their record as a "risk factor"? How will that impact their academic and professional career?

Will there come a point where the service is trusted outright and positives aren't checked and students are penalized and/or expelled by default?

I agree, there is no easy solution which doesn't have a cost. Stuffing 100 students into a classroom is just wrong from a teaching standpoint. But so is subjecting students to a "academic cavity search".

I attended a state university and so know what you mean about 100 student classrooms. I currently attend a private university and pay quite a bit more. But there are only 15-20 students in the class and the learning quality is much much higher.

We depend so much on "services" that the higher ups think that "bodies" and "resources" like schools, classrooms, teachers, and books are expendable. That is WRONG.

I'm sorry to hear that you are burdened with so many students. However, burdening students' conscience with these screening services is the quick fix which will lead to a death spiral of educational quality.

It makes me sick to know that my children will have to go through this.

Re:There is an important upside to the system

[Dark Lord Seth]

And I am a student. And you guys wouldn't believe the crap people try to force down our throaths. Persoanlly, among the worst atrocities college forced upon me is an essay about... *drumroll* THE EFFICIENT DISPOSAL OF ICT WASTE! *ba-dum CHING!* How's that for a class where 50% wants to become a developer, 25% network administrator and the other 25% always skips class? IF I had done that essay as expected it would have cost me quite a bit of time and every second I spent writing that essay would be one second too much, which pretty much everyone though. The end result? 12 nearly identical essays, while 12 others never were handed in. No one was interested, no one gave a damn and no one wrote one original bit.

Of course it's easy to blame student of being lazy. Tell you what, you make college worth my time AND money, I'll do your goddamn assignments.

Re:There is an important upside to the system

[WanderingGhost]

What would be nice is for all of you complaining about rampant cheating to honestly say how many of your students cheat vs how many do not.

Honestly - I gave an assignment to 90 students last year. 5 were original. I returned all the others with the original URL attached.

Hmmm - do they have an alternative?

[Asic Eng]

"What I object to most about the policy at McGill is that it treats students as though we are guilty until proven innocent," said Rosenfeld

Well it seems the examiner has the right, even the duty to examine the papers which have been submitted. Checking for plagiarism seems fair, and also that he is using technical aids for doing so.

The article also mentions:

"The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.

It seems that all the system does is check for plagiarism. Assuming it does that in a sensible manner (not providing false positives without pointing to the reference material) then it's just relieving the examiners from boring repetetive work.

A seperate issue is if they don't just have to have the paper checked, but also integrated into the database. I tend to think papers submitted to the university examiners should be public domain, though.

If Only.........

[RenegadeTempest]

we could force people to use this service before posting on /., maybe we wouldn't have to wade through so many duplicate posts.

What's the problem?

[Complicity]

I think that I'm failing to see the problem here... if a student does not submit their essay to this site to be plagarism-checked, what is stopping the professors from submitting it themselves if they believe that there has been plagarism, and achieving the same thing? It isn't about money, because the article mentioned that this occurred during McGill's "free trial" period with the service. Is it a copyright thing?

Re:What's the problem?

[clifyt]

It probably is a copyright thing. I am on a few testing committees with my university, and these apps have come up quite a bit -- we are actually under contract for one and I've bitched and moaned about it. I turned in a journal article I had cowritten in, and it came back as plagerized...I had the guys look into it, and as I *RARELY* use my own name on journal articles (its a little hard to get published when folks find out that while you are a noted name in the field, you don't have a Ph.D...and ya actually dropped out of school before ya got your bachellors because a research project got in your way of actually dealing with the piddly shit...and 10 years later, you are still working on the same research with a team of people under ya).

Turns out, they had *MY* article in the database...my copyright was assigned to the journal for that publication only. I retained all other publication rights. I even had to sign a waiver to allow the article to be published electronically because at the time the journal didn't have a site, and the publisher wanted to show case some new ideas.

The plagerizing company had no legitimate right to the copyright, but it was in there system in some form (I don't even care if it was tokenized down to line noise...it is essentially my works) and I bitched some people out about it.

I've heard a few of my friends had the same reaction (well, at least their names were attached to the papers...must be nice to have degrees and shit :-)...and apparently my employeer has modified their agreement with the company they are using to where the papers submitted still belong to the university, and that they are licensed to use the papers solely for papers within the university. Nothing is to be stored elsewhere or used for any other purposes. We don't get it for free and we pay quite a bit so they were willing to work within these bounds...as a employee of the university, I'm satisfied with that...if I turn in a paper as a student, I don't see how the university can be held accountable for using it elsewhere as long as I'm given credit for the paper, but if they were used for BFE-University -- I'd be mighty pissed (err...once again).

So, if your university is doing this, make certain that your copyright stays within fair use only...adding your paper to the global database to help a corporation profit is NOT fairuse. Helping your university, the one you pay money to and support in various other ways, is -- IMHO -- fairusage.

blah

Why should the student bear the burden?

[digital photo]

If the teacher is truly concerned about cheating and plaigerism, then the teacher/official should be the one paying the service and submitting the works to the 3rd party business, not the student.

The student's obligation is to do the work of the assignment and turn it in. Grading and detection of falsehoods/duplicity/cheating/etc are the responsibilities of the teachers, not the students.

What's next? Submit your work to a business which does the grading?

My site gets hit by turnitin and at first, I was amused. But if a teacher is forcing a student to go through this process, then that teacher is basically saying that their students are not trustworthy and is an assumption of guilt by default.

Shame on the teacher for requiring that of their student and attempting to fail the student. Shame on the school for letting it happen.

_His_ Original Work?

[Czernobog]

All College/University material, regardless of whether it was lectures/notes given or work sumbitted by students is IP of the University, so it can decide what and when to do with it.
At least that's the reality I've encountered so far from all the places I've been to

The fairest policy I've seen (and that is by no means fair IMO) was to declare all work joint IP of the student-College, but the College handles it and decides what to do. The student only has "advisory" rights and gets a share of any of the possible profits arising from the IP.

This means that "His Original Work" is a euphemism and if he doesn't like it, well he should have checked what he was signing when he enrolled. I certainly did.

Re:_His_ Original Work?

[dr ttol]

Is this true? What about personal projects done in the dorm? All essays and papers are property of the university (or atleast more than 0%)? Can someone shed more light on this?

Re:_His_ Original Work?

[Czernobog]

Except that when you enroll, the first thing they have you sign is to hand-over that copyright and resign of the right of making any future possible claims.

Re:_His_ Original Work?

[dcollins]

All College/University material, regardless of whether it was lectures/notes given or work sumbitted by students is IP of the University, so it can decide what and when to do with it. At least that's the reality I've encountered so far from all the places I've been to

Please specify what institutions you're talking about, in what country, and at least one piece of evidence that this is an official policy -- because I don't believe it.

I teach in Massachusetts and talk to many teachers at a number of institutions. For example, we certainly own all our lecture notes (the union would go ballistic if that wasn't the case, the only thing the school has a right to even see is our syllabus). I've never heard of students not owning the papers they write in class, anywhere.

Standard operating procedure

[pieterh]

Many (most?) schools treat students like a burden. Educate the brats, get them to behave, beat them into line, do whatever it takes to break them and mould them into proper members of society.

If students regularly cheat in written exams, it's a good sign that the exams are pointless. The proper response is to ask "why are students so unmotivated that they don't bother to make an original contribution", not "how can we catch and punish the bastards one more time."

Sadly it's always simpler to turn complex questions into easy "wrong and right" issues.

It's obvious from the Internet that the majority of people can be, in the right circumstances, incredibly creative and original. The challenge is to create these circumstances, not to enforce a dogmatic and broken system of education that students are obviously not interested in.

Re:Standard operating procedure

[BattleTroll]

"If students regularly cheat in written exams, it's a good sign that the exams are pointless. "

If students are regularly cheating on exams, it's a good sign that these students are a. not concerned about actually getting value for their dollar, b. too lazy to learn the material, c. morally corrupt and lacking integrity, d. shouldn't be in college to begin with.

If you can't do your own work, why are you in college to begin with? The who point is to get a 'higher education', not copy off your neighbor and wallow in dishonest behavior.

Quoted

[t_allardyce]

What if you put quotes around the whole paper - then maybe the computer will be tricked into thinking its a "quote" and the prof wont notice (if the " is in a smaller type) ;)

As for the trial, maybe im missing something but why doesnt the university submit the papers themselves or just have their own internal system?

drug use in sports?

[garcia]

No, it's not even close to testing for drugs, being that this plagarism detector is at the collegiate level.

People aren't *always* tested for every event they compete in. They might have random tests by the NCAA or college and they might be tested by the college for suspicion but they aren't tested every single time at every single event.

The point in the article about it being laziness and budget issues by the college not wanting to hire enough staff is ridiculous though. Either a single professor grades the papers or a professor and a grad student do it. What are there supposed to be 2 or 3 professors grading papers for each class?

I don't agree with this particular method being chosen to police the papers... I think that professors should have to grade the papers (for spelling, grammar, and for content -- plagerized or not). If the student has shown issues in the past with this topic then perhaps it should be scrutinized more carefully (even by a commitee) but by a web-based program?

Let's get back to what's important in colleges... TEACHING and GRADING. Stop worrying so much about how much free time you have to work on your next book.

Hm.

[mellon]

So, a system that prevents people from cheating is good for you if it works, and if you are not cheating. Why? Because the people who cheated won't be counted in the average, and so your score will go up. It's bad for you if the people who cheated would have gotten good grades if they hadn't cheated, but how likely is that?

And in what sense is the site making money off this fellow's work? Are they selling it to other students to plagiarize? I'm guessing that what they're doing is making sure nobody else plagiarizes *his* work.

I don't want to belittle this fellow's feelings, but this really sounds like a case of angry testosterone syndrome - he's identified something, decided that it's an insult, and decided to fight it no matter what. Been there, done that. Hell, I did it yesterday when someone backed a change I made out of CVS. Getting pissed off didn't help. I'd feel more sympathy if, e.g., he'd submitted his paper and been falsely accused of plagiarizing.

It will be interesting to see what happens if this system sees wide use. At some point, at the level of undergraduate papers, it seems like it will inevitably start reporting false positives simply because there isn't really that much to say about any given topic, so once you have a couple of hundred papers on that topic, there's always going to be one paper that's enough like another that it will show up as plagiarism even though it's not.

The harvest of cheaters

[cluge]

Bitch - "What ever happened to student teacher trust?"

Answer - It's being violated so regulary by students cheating that teachers wonder if recent degreed graduates really learned anything. Cheating is an epedemic. A student bitching about "student teacher trust" is akin to a speader bitching about a cop with a RADAR gun. As long as the school pays for the pattern recgonition there shouldn't be a problem. As long as the student submitted original work, there shouldn't be an issue. The teacher still grades the work, but he/she at least has a fighting chance to recgnoize if major portions of that term paper were lifted verbatim from a quick google search.

The people that complain about this technology seem to be just bitter that teachers finally have a tool to help them find cheats. Perhaps too many students have gotten use to skating by?

Maybe it's better for the student to submit...

[mellon]

After all, the teacher could just require that the student submit the paper electronically, and then submit the paper to the website him- or herself. And then, if it turned out that it was plagiarized, the teacher would have to initiate disciplinary action against the student.

Whereas, if the student submits the paper, and it turns out to be plagiarized, the student has an opportunity to rewrite it without any negative sanctions. If you _are_ a cheater, this sounds like a better deal. If you're _not_, I can see where it would be more than a little bit offensive.

Fight plagiarism but not like this

[Mikelikus]

I'm a university student and many times I knew that most professors had code to detect plagiarism. In fact, I remember one that had a code that didn't consider the filename, the function/methods/etc name nor the variable names. He had implemented (in lisp!) something that detected similar program flows.

This was so absurdly over-zealous that I know people who had just one similar (not equal) function and had 0 due to that.

Either way I think that it is only fair that there's anti-plagiarism methods by the professor.
Nevertheless I strongly disagree with these kind of websites (like turnitin) which profit - by ways that might even be unknown to us - with the free work of students.

The teaching staff should do that kind of work and actually read and be knowledgable about the subject the essays are about.
If the professor can't do it then maybe he should go back to being a student.

Re:Fight plagiarism but not like this

[Quixote]

This was so absurdly over-zealous that I know people who had just one similar (not equal) function and had 0 due to that.

That, obviously, is wrong.

Look, a technology like this anti-plagiarism service is just a tool. It may flag an assignment as havng been plagiarised; and having flagged that, it should present the evidence to the teacher who should be the one deciding whether it warrants action or not.

I have been a TA and a teacher. I have caught plagiarists. Usually, if it is just a small code fragment, you just let it go. After all, all of the students are reading from the same books, and looking a the same sample code, and hence could come up with similar snippets. The problem comes when large chunks of the program are the same. Or, if there's been an obvious attempt to hide the copying (changing every variable "i" to "ii").

Often, what used to give the game away was the use of an odd data structure, or an odd language feature. For example: 95% of the students would use a "for" loop, and then 2 assignments would show up with a "repeat until" or a "do while". When asked, the original author would have a pretty good explanation; but the cheater would not have any.

Coming to this case: the student has no right to gripe about this. Saying that he's being considered "guilty until proven innocent" is asinine. By the same token, his assignments shouldn't be graded either: he should just get an "A" to start with!

Would it have been better if the professor had taken his assignment and submitted it to the service? After all, the professor can use whatever tools he likes to help him do his job. And catching plagiarists is a part of his job, unfortunately.

Re:Fight plagiarism but not like this

[Lord_Dweomer]

" Coming to this case: the student has no right to gripe about this. Saying that he's being considered "guilty until proven innocent" is asinine. By the same token, his assignments shouldn't be graded either: he should just get an "A" to start with! Would it have been better if the professor had taken his assignment and submitted it to the service? After all, the professor can use whatever tools he likes to help him do his job. And catching plagiarists is a part of his job, unfortunately. "

Saying he feels he's being considered guilty until proven innocent is HARDLY asinine. This kind of measure means exactly the same thing as the "only criminals/terrorists have something to hide" measures. It means that there is an assumption the monitored individuals will do something bad, and thus they ALL have to be watched, because they MIGHT all be criminals.

It is a pity that someone as educated as yourself to be a teacher would miss out on this key concept.

Now, the second point I would like to make is not on ethical grounds at all, but rather legal ones, which is the main reason this student is doing this at all. The issue is that he feels the IP is his, and thus the company cannot assimilate it into their database which aids in them selling their services to schools. In other words, he's pissed that they're making a profit off of his (allegedly) misappropriated IP.

The problem isn't about plagarization.

[Queuetue]

The problem is twofold:

First, the accessability of information increases every day - the people who benefit from it are those that stay ahead of the curve. Those that benefit from the status quo fall behind.

The system where you are ranked on your ability to function within an autonomous vacuum is probably going to fall apart, because people in the real world no longer enforce that vacuum. Today's kids synthesize from multiple branches of media in everything they do, and sharing data, information, or anything else digital is second nature.

Judging someone on how well they write a paper is silly, in a world where the paper is already available, and readily accessable. Find something worthwhile to judge them on, and do the hard work necessary to judge them accurately on it, because they won't do it for you. You're laziness will only make more loopholes for them to control you through.

Secondly, todays educational institutions (most of them anyway) are cheap shams of what they once were. Going to university used to mean a period of hardship and disconnection from your old life where you were shaped into a person who cherished academics, tradition, service, honor and culture.

Now, it's the place you go to party for 4 years so you can put something "totally rad" on your resume. These institutions are letting the students down, and in turn, the students are letting the institutions down, and the whole mess is sinking into the sewer.

Re:The problem isn't about plagarization.

[otprof]

The dirty work of educating the unwashed undergraduate masses falls to lower ranked profs or GAs. Those really expierenced professors who do want to "just teach" are marginalized out to smaller schools or satellite campuses.

Most of your points about the disregard for teaching at large universities have some validity. I would urge that you reconsider your use of the term "marginalized." Many people go into this business because they love teaching, love helping others discover truth, and love working with undergraduates. I teach at a small liberal arts college with a stellar reputation (in the region especially, but also in the whole country). I guarantee that if you are looking for a great, traditional education like you described you can find it at one of these "marginalized" places.

Don't get me wrong; money is still a huge issue here. Tuition is climbing and there is more and more emphasis on fund raising and pleasing rich alumni, etc. But I can honestly say that teaching is still our first priority. We have small classes taught by professors that you can meet with for any reason (class related or personal), and we send students to the best graduate schools in the country.

I am not in exile because I don't want to be a research super-star. I'm here because I want to be in a place that values my priorities and skills in teaching.

PS: I am also an active member of the professional academy. One difference: I try to get my students involved in my work and even take them to conferences to check things out.

Re:The problem isn't about plagarization.

[kryptkpr]

Secondly, todays educational institutions (most of them anyway) are cheap shams of what they once were. Going to university used to mean a period of hardship and disconnection from your old life where you were shaped into a person who cherished academics, tradition, service, honor and culture.

I'm currently enrolled in second year undergraduate studies at a major Canadian University.. I'm taking a BEng in Computer Engineering. And let me tell you, it IS a period of hardship and disconnection from my old life.. Especially during February and October, I don't go out, at all.. By the time I make it home at night I barely have enough left in me to turn the monitor on and refresh slashdot.

I have lots of friends in the arts, and I've taken some English and Philosophy courses to try to broad my horizons, and it's pretty much the same there. They have inhuman ammounts of reading to do (they seem to read 12 hours a day, every day), as each 13 week course seems to require at least 5 books be read, understood, and you have to be able to compare and contrast all 5 against one another.

Granted, there a lot of partying does go on, but those people .. fail. They either end up on academic probation and clean up their act, or I simply don't see them again..

The biggest problem that I'm encoutering is that Undergrads are definitely a least-priority for my university. We get classes in the crappy temporary buildings (double cohart year anyone? whoever thought OAC was a bad idea needs to be shot, OAC _was_ highschool for me, it's where I learned to actually work!). We also get the crappiest timeslots (a class at 8:30am.. followed by a class at 5:30pm, ugh). Oh, and lots of TAs (and profs for that matter) have trouble communicating in English. Maybe if I was of asian or middle eastern descent I'd have less trouble.. but alas, I'm a member of the new minority, white folks.

Turnitin@home

[NoOneInParticular]

I mentioned this in another post for this story, but it might be interesting for teachers reading this site.

It's frightfully easy to write your own plagiarism detector. All you have to do is write a script to scan the paper and run a few samples of 10 consecutive words in the paper as a search term through google. If for two different queries you get the same site in the google result list, it's a practical certainty that you've found a copy at that site. Chances of someone coming up with the same wording of some subject in two disjoint fragments of 10 words are abysimally small.

Given that most plagiarism happens by copying from the internet (and students usually use google to actually find such documents), you yourself can use google in the same way.

I once wrote a 20-line python script to do just this, and it worked very well. It even found some plagiarism inside a an (awarded) document that was plagiarised.

Re:Turnitin@home

[Alan Cox]

One of the problems with using google is the student themselves can put their paper fragments on the net either to mask other searches or to wind up the lecturer, or even to drop the university into a nice juicy lawsuit so they can get a degree, their fees paid and a bonus.

You actually need snapshots from before the paper existed to do anything meaningful.

The second problem is that lots of little businesses sell people guaranteed *new* papers.

There are things that can be done more constructively to deal with such problems, and at least verify the student knows some of the subject - one of the most obvious being to randomly pick a few students each submission and invite them to a 30 minute defence of their essay.

This is a wide spread problem

[Liquidrage]

The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!).

I feel the same way everytime I'm forced to reply to an email at work. Why should Mircosoft make money off my original work? Why can't I just enscribe my message onto clay tablets I make myself.
Everyone seems to think they have some right to profit these days. The nerve.

PLAGIARISM DETECTED

[Kinniken]

Firsts0rz :-D

This sentence has been detected as being plagiarised from:

Anonymous Coward

Grade: F-

Let's separate two issues

[Anonymous Coward]

First, is it legal to cross check students' work against publicly accessible sources? The answer it obviously yes, whether using google or an automated service. If anything, the element of automation is desirable, since it reduces the arbitrariness of cross checking only certain students' work.

Second, can you make it a condition of a course that work submitted will be licensed to such a service? Debatable. Copyright normally vests in the student. However, it is often the case that universities require that students grant them a royalty free non exclusive license to use the work for essentially internal purposes. See, e.g., McMaster.ca.

In principle, an appropriately drafted policy, adopted by the university, and made known to students before enrolment, would allow such use. However, I suspect that in this case the policy was never formally adopted by the university (especially given the trial use of the software) and as such amounted to an attempt by the university to unilaterally vary their contract with the student.

On a personal note, just yesterday I failed a student for lifting the bulk of an assignment straight from the web, while not too long ago I had the dubious pleasure of failing another student who paid me the tribute of taking four pages directly from my own text.

Recursive problem

[onceler]

Whenever the topic of plagiarism detection comes up, there's always plenty of students who argue that it's offensive to treat them as guilty until proven innocent.

Trouble is, it's hard to tell which students are saying that because that's what they really think, and which students are just copying a response they read on the internet...

Wish my professors used this

[chrisgeleven]

Man I wish the professors here used this service. You people have no idea how many college students cheat and copy each other's work. One of my roommates actually uses the same work his brother used 3 years ago when he went here.

Here am I working my ass off because I believe in doing my own work so I can learn while everyone else tries to cheat.

How do you monitor the anti-cheating service?

[rueger]

The University will be paying (probably a lot) to this company to check student papers for plagiarism. So how does the University measure whether it gets value for it's dollar?

Obviously it will look at the number of students who are reported to have plagiarized. If no students turn up as cheating, then either the company's scan doesn't work, or the University's students are so honest that there is no reason to pay for the service.

In either case, the company reviewing the papers has a pretty strong incentive to adjust their software to generate more positives. "Gee, well, we're just trying to err on the side of caution. It wouldn't be fair to the Good Students to let someone through who might be cheating!"

I'd even wager that the company in question has already projected that a certain number of papers will be rejected each year. What happens if they miss that agreed upon quota?

Sorry, but under these circumstances it seems unreasonable to suggest that some 19 year old student can successfully defend themselves against a large corporation that has already been endorsed by the University.

Re:How do you monitor the anti-cheating service?

[mx80]

You're assumeing that the result of the plagiarism check is a simple "plagiarized" or "original" answer. But it isn't. Of course turn-it-in will document the sources from which a plagiarized paper is copied. And of course the prof will check whether the paper and the source are similar enough to constitute plagiarism. Every university I've been at required both the student's paper and the papers from which s/he copied as docmentation of a plagiarism case.

Re:Honor Code

[Rikerag515]

Thats a really good question.

As for my university, Dalhousie,which makes use of turnitin.com, there are 3 main possibilities with some other less common considerations. First a zero on the paper, which is damn near guaranteed. The second is failure in the course. Thirdly, and the most severe is explusion from the university.

Even if a student was to "get through" the university states that at any given time they may REVOKE the students DEGREE if they are found to have plagarized!

The process is really quite disgusting and strenuous on both profs and students. First, suspected cases have to be turned into the Senate Discipline Committee, which then sets up a hearing and at some point summons you to this hearing.

I can tell you from experience, that many of my professors dread the process and truly hate turnitin.com. They would much rather catch the plagarism themselves and deal with it in their own way. However, the profs career is even at risk if they don't follow university policy and submit to this discipline commitee.

The worst thing about it is the guilty until innocent approach that seems to have been taken. When you have be accused to have plagarized, you must PROVE and EXPLAIN how you didn't. Thank-you democracy.

Lastly, although I haven't plagarized, my friend came really close to undergoing this process. He passed in a history essay, and it was also submitted it to turnitin.com, the result was a bunch of flagged sections. Upon closer observation and discussion with the professor, it turned out that the material was all properly cited. Instead the stupid turnitin.com program/process said the sentence structure was close to other sentences in hundreds of other essays. For example, imagine going to a magazine, and flipping through 45 pages looking for the sentence "The cat is hungry" by piecing together the words for that sentence by grabbing these words over all of the 45 pages in the magazine. Remember that simpsons episode where Homers mom came back (this season I believe) and he got the message from reading the news paper.

Maybe this is why the profs don't like it. All I know is that it has created a really negative atmosphere in the university, that coupled with my $7000 tution sometimes makes me wonder why I pay for this pain.

You guys can check out our discipline thingy here

PLAGARISM The best part is the self-plagarism policy!

Re:Honor Code

[leerpm]

At most universities here in Canada, if you are caught cheating on an essay, the minimum punishment is usually an F in the class. For repeat offenders, or more senior students (people who should know better than the ones who are fresh out of high school) the punishment can be more severe, and may include expulsion. If you are caught cheating, or even caught with an appeared intention to cheat on a final exam, you are usually expelled from the school. In which case you can kiss your academic career good-bye because no other school will ever accept you.

Copyright infringement

[nuggz]

The problem is that nobody has the balls to sue the copyright infringing plagarism detector.

They are copying the work, for the sole purpose of destroying it's marketable value. This is very illegal. I hope someone nails them a few times, at the maximum penalty they'll be gone.

Also as a student I should not have to give rights of my work to anyone.

Academic fraud is a problem, but the end doesn't justify the means.

Re:Copyright infringement

[An Onerous Coward]

The only "marketable value" being destroyed is the money that next semester's panicked students would have been willing to pay to turn it in as their own? That's not a valid objection. If an assignment ends up having legitimate value, a service designed solely to keep others from claiming your work as their own does nothing to harm that value. In fact, it protects the author. [Note: I don't understand the system in question, and therefore cannot say whether it was designed solely to avert plagarism.]

Nor is it right to say that you shouldn't be required to give up any rights to your work to receive academic credit. It's part of the agreement. Now, the fact is that turnitin.com is a third party, so you may not have contractual obligations with them. But such a broad, sweeping statement is a sign of immaturity.

The problems I have with this:

1) As I said, it's a third party.
2) Depending on how turnitin.com works, it may amount to republication of student papers, which may or may not be actionable under copyright law.
3) Keeping student papers on file increases the value of their service, and therefore constitutes using their work for a commercial purpose.

Re:Copyright infringement

[An Onerous Coward]

You're saying that, at no point in your college education, were you told that attending the school required you to follow the rules in the student handbook? You were. Repeatedly. I'm sure you were also given rudimentary instruction on what constituted plagarism, and the punishments that would be meted out if you did so.

The contract exists, even if you never signed a piece of paper saying that you agreed to follow the rules. You agreed to the terms by attending classes, and if it is discovered that you violated the rules, they have every right to impose academic penalties. All you have to do to avoid those penalties is leave the school and never come back.

According to your farfetched interpretation of contract law, if I run a business, I cannot remove a person from my place of business unless I had them sign a contract before coming in.

Most likely you're just being a whiny little troll, but for just one moment try to think of the poor young Slashdotters who are entering college right now. If they swallow your crap advice, they're going to do something very stupid that may destroy their academic future.

Please, think of the Slashlings.

Re:Copyright infringement

[An Onerous Coward]

By what stretch of the imagination is plagarism legal? Even if it is perfectly legal for me, as a copyright holder, to let another person claim my work as their own original creation (which isn't even close to the same thing as merely assigning copyright), it is illegal for that person to try and pull off the subterfuge in an academic setting. It's part of the contract between you and the university: Do your own damned work (paraphrased). [and before you go off on your "I never signed no steenkin' contract" spiel, read my other response]

I guess that, by "companies", you mean "three former grad students running a cash-only business from a small apartment just off campus. You're right, the illegal and immoral persecution of these upstanding entrepreneurs is decimating our economy. Sorry, but what plagarists do is not a noble expression of capitalistic innovation; it's an attempt at subverting the educational process by helping others receiving credit for work they did not do.

I have no idea how anything I said could be construed as support for Microsoft's antitrust violations. Perhaps you're simply... what's the word... trolling? Perish the thought.

copyright issue: the company keeps the essays

[dankelley]

I am a professor and I certainly am in favour of catching cheaters. But I have a question. Do these students sign a copyright form permitting the company to archive the essays? And, if so, surely the form would not hold up in court, since it would have been coerced. (Sign this form or fail this course.)

Why might students not want their essays stored in a company database?

1. Good writers might fear that their ideas, or even their words, could be stolen (by all sorts of low-life: disgruntled/underpaid company members, malicious/political hackers, underpaid/jealous professors, ...).
2. Bad writers who are otherwise on a fast track to success might not want folks ever to see their bad writing. Imagine a presidential candidate who wrote total drivel in his undergraduate years ... how hard would it be for an opponent to get that drivel and publish it?

Sure, the company could claim the storage was secure against hackers, and they could claim that no employee would ever sell the essays, but any /.er knows that such claims would be hard to trust.

There are probably technological solutions to this problem, involving encryption keys. Folks on /. might have some good ideas on that. For example, how much would it cost, 30 years from now, for a presidential campaign to buy CPU time to break a key that is secure today?

PS. I noticed that the original posting had just one source, and so if folks would like to read more, they might like to check out the Globe and Mail newspaper website for more discussion, including of students' thoughts.

Re:Honor Code

[Dr. Evil]

IIRC, my university's policy was to put a blotch on your academic transcripts (goodbye graduate school), and if you're caught again, you're expelled for academic dishonesty. Most Canadian universities have similar policies, so I don't doubt McGill is the same.

From a blurb they have on the policy http://www.mcgill.ca/integrity/strategies/student/ , it seems they also have a problem my university had... professors who like to keep the incident behind closed doors.

I recall once there was an outrageous attempt by a group of people I was living with to plagarise. Six people, living on the same floor in the same residence all took the same paper, and handed it in. Stunning really. Only one of them took the time to reword it, but the others just handed it in. The situation was so completely over the top, that although it was reported to the dean, the dean decided not to put it on their transcripts... they were all forced to repeat the assignment to keep it off their records, the professor's full late penalties applied (mark was cut in half). They got off very light in my opinion, but the professor was widely perceived to be a bit of a joke, and oddly enough, knowing them better than the dean or the professor, I can honestly say that they normally weren't plagarists... I think the group-mentality just set in and they all did something very stupid.

two things

[pruss]

All my students are told that I reserve the right to ask for an electronic version to run through turnitin.com, and that if they do not want to do this, then I will make alternate arrangements. Nobody's asked for alternate arrangements, but if they did, I would ask for an outline and a draft ahead of time.

My own worry about turnitin.com is that they allow students to access the service as a "deterrent", so that students can see whether their essays infringe. Since students should already know whether their essays are plagiarized, the only point here is to submit essays to see whether one will get caught.

Fortunately, most plagiarists are stupid. (I keep a mental list of anecdotes of dumb plagiarists, like the one who turned in an essay by Karl Marx--not just any essay by Marx, but one that was assigned for class reading--or the one who got caught because the essay included words like "My mother always said, 'Frank ...'" but his name wasn't Frank, or the highschool student who accidentally stapled a printout of his source website to his paper.)

No need for this in smaller classes

[otprof]

I'm a professor in the humanitites and I've caught a handful of people cheating on their essays over the years. Our school used a trial version of a system like this, but I don't really trust it.

My classes are never more than 25 or 30, and I read all the essays myself. A good student could probably get something by me (however, a good student can generally write something much better than what you'd find on the internet). The weak students (or lazy ones who wait until the last moment) are the ones who can't get away with copying something from the internet.

When a below-average student suddenly turns something in that has a thesis statement, well developed paragraphs, and good grammar, I'm immediately suspicious. Maybe they're just getting some help from someone (technically forbidden as well, unless cited). So I type a few key phrases into Google, probably the same source that they used to find the material to begin with. If I don't find anything but am still suspicious I have the student in and ask them directly. Hopefully my students know that I'm a reasonable enough person that they wouldn't have to resort to such measures and then openly lie about it.

That said, mostly the problem is with younger students who don't know the difference between quoting, paraphrasing, and plagiarism. When I find something that is an ignorant mistake we can usually turn it into a "teaching moment."

Copyright?

[imadork]

What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text like "Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited"? If it works for Major League Baseball, why can't it work for a student?

I had an Engineering teacher once who was too lazy to make up different tests for his courses every year. He got upset that the IEEE student chapter was archiving student's copies of his tests for use in future years (which, since he rarely changed the questions on the tests, was like an answer key), so he required all classwork and tests to bear a copyright notice with his name and the students' name on it. He specifically told the IEEE chapter that they could not copy his class materials. Faced with this, they stopped archiving the tests, even though they probably could have still archived original copies and just not permitted anyone to make any reproductions.

Of course, a student is in a much weaker position to assert his or her rights, since he needs a grade from the teacher more then the teacher needs to grade his paper. But I'm sure there's more than one law student who was anal enough to try this...

Re:Copyright?

[grumling]

What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text like "Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited"? If it works for Major League Baseball, why can't it work for a student?

US copyright law specifically does this. However, it is up to the copyright holder to defend the copyright. The law is on the side of the copyright holder, and court costs can be included, I believe. However, finding a lawyer willing to defend your copyright could prove difficult, unless your paper has some sort of value to someoene other than you. Remember, many people write music and novels. Not too many people make a living writing and publishing "unknown" talent, so proving damage would be difficult if not impossible. Most copyright infringement cases deal with the infringement after the copied work makes millions of dollars.

Value of intelectual property, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder!

Re:Copyright?

[pongo000]

I had an Engineering teacher once who was too lazy to make up different tests for his courses every year. He got upset that the IEEE student chapter was archiving student's copies of his tests for use in future years

So a teacher that reuses tests every semester is "lazy"...what does that make students who depend upon memorizing archived tests to pass their courses? "Geniuses"?

I think you're being somewhat disingenous here. And good for him for not permitting the IEEE to subvert the education process.

Re:Copyright?

[anthony_dipierro]

This post is Copyright 2004 by Anthony DiPierro. Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited.

What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text

Absolutely nothing. However, just because you write something doesn't mean it's true. Can I sue slashdot for distributing this post?

If it works for Major League Baseball, why can't it work for a student?

Major League Baseball has lost a lot of its copyright fights. Specifically the whole "no description or account of this game" has been thrown out by courts. Doesn't stop them from saying it. But saying it doesn't make it true.

Cheaters go old school.

[Gambrinus]

With sites like turnitin.com and others sites developing broad databases, students are going back to the roots of plagiarism. They go to the library and copy out of a book. Most books are not in the anit-plagiarism databases. An instructor may feel that the document is plagiarized but be unable to find concrete proof. Instructors have to have hard evidence. A student can always come back and sue the universisty since the rest of their life may be affected by this instance.

My favorite way of catching plagiarizers is when I type the first sentence in Google and the site they took the paper from comes up.

Web Usage Stats

[velkr0]

I have never actually had to use Turn-It-In at my university, the University of Western Ontario, even tough it is used there. However, many instructors still requested electronic copies be sent to them.
Last term the instructor wanted a electronic copy of everyone's essays since it allowed him to read the papers on his laptop during trips (he was a part time instructor, who travelled a lot)

Anyway, one day I determined he submitted the papers to Turn-It-In, simply by reviewing my usage on my web site, and noticed many hits from Turn-It-In's crawler. I figured it was picking up on my name, which was included in the header of every page on my essay and which is heavily plastered on my web site.

This made me feel like a criminal!! Mainly since I was not told about submitting the paper to Turn-It-In. I never would use someone else's work with out citing it and didn't have much to fear, but just the idea of missing one or two footnotes, was enough to get the nerves going. If I personally had to submit the papers and I was fully aware of the process, I would have ensured every source was cited.
These kids at McGill should have nothing to fear and should not be concerned about the originality of their work, especially if they ARE informed about the process before hand.

Moral of the story.

• Have a web site.
• Review your stats.
• and never trust your instructors.

Re:Web Usage Stats

[mx80]

This made me feel like a criminal!! Mainly since I was not told about submitting the paper to Turn-It-In. I never would use someone else's work with out citing it and didn't have much to fear, but just the idea of missing one or two footnotes, was enough to get the nerves going.

Rest assured, every conscientious instructor will compare your paper with perhaps similar passages in the textbook or widely available other sorces, s/he wil put "suspicious" phrases through google, and will keep an eye out for similarities between your paper and that of other students. Does this make you feel like a criminal, too? Do they check ID's at exams at Western? Does that mae you feel like a criminal?

Remember that many universities policies require instructors to be vigilant in preventing and detecting academic dishonesty.

If I personally had to submit the papers and I was fully aware of the process, I would have ensured every source was cited.

That's something you should do anyway.

Source Scan

[BHennessy]

In the computer science department at my uni, they scan all source based assignments for similarity with other submissions. You can see average similarity and max similarity to change it before the due date. I don't know of anyone objecting to it.

Students hold copyrights to their work

[sjbe]

That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.

I cannot speak for every or even most academic institutions firsthand. That said, I think this statement is completely false for virtually all universities here in the United States.

I know I'm pretty darn careful about what I sign and I'm quite sure I've never assigned any copyrights to any of the universities I've attended. It's simply not a common or accepted practice. I think most students are not particularly aware of the fact that they have created copyrighted material, but that has no bearing under the law. If a student wants to prohibit reproduction of his/her work, that student can (and does) have that right.

My personal experience has been when I've written material professors wanted to reuse, the've always been quite careful to ask permission. (cheerfully granted of course) Most professors I know are actually quite sensitive to this sort of thing.

While IANAL, I'm pretty certain that absent any explicit agreement between the university and a student, the student retains the copyright to all his/her work. The university would be entitled to material produced as a "work-for-hire", say for example materials produced in a work-study program. But otherwise the copyright remains with the creator. The university would have to get the student's permission to reproduce their work.

Funny?

[sacrilicious]

We can no longer endure these indignancies. Don't they know we should all be treated as infallible saints until we can be proven otherwise.

Parent post is currently modded "funny". I can't tell if it was intended to be funny, but regardless there is an underlying serious issue: that of on whom the burden of proof lies in questions of guilt or innocence. Both Congress and the Bush administration are systematically orchestrating numerous radical reductions to the legal protections formerly held by citizens. These protections should be given much more care and public debate than they're getting. I sincerely hope that the debate doesn't simply amount to chuckles at strawman positions.

Catch the cheaters and run them out..

[sabecon]

I am sick of all the people justifying the cheaters.

The fact is that the cheaters are cheapening the value of your degree. What you are paying for when you pay the big bucks for the tuition is the reputation of the school. When some dumbass cheater gets out without knowing what they are supposed to know, they harm the school's reputation that is on your diploma. They are cheapenng your degree.

Yes, make all the stupid justifications that you don't need what they are teaching and the assignments are meaningless. You seem to miss the function that universities provide. Their business is not teaching. Their function is certifying that that you learned what you say you did. There is nothing that you cannot learn by just going to the library and reading it yourself and observing the world around you on your own. Their true responsibility begins and ends with putting the grade on the gradebook. Sometimes you get a great instructor that is a good teacher, sometimes you get one that sucks. Luck of he draw. It is not their responsibility to teach. It is your responsibility to learn.

You say that they are using the student's papers without compensation? Any tool that they use to weed out the slackers makes your degree that much more valuable.

Give me a degree from an institution that it is free from the cheating losers. That is true value.

Automating Control = Downward Spiral

[Nadsat]

Technology should be used *ONLY* where it enhances human expression. Books, paint, and the internet are examples of various expressive-friendly technologies, for example.

*AUTOMATED* technologies used for purposes of control and regulation are inherently wrong. Such automation grossly assumes a kind of ridged non-humaness in how society ought to function. Automated "anti-cheat" devices for schools, automated red light policing cameras, tickets, and racial profiling, as examples, must be stopped now.

Compare to Stanford's Policies

[YahoKa]

It is interesting that Stanford, a top school in the world, trusts the studens to uphold the honor code. I remember reading about the problems of cheating, and McGill's exceptionally strict examination policies - and then they compared this to Stanford. I personally would never cheat, and having to submit my papers to a cheat detector would really ruin the learning environment for me.

Here is a little blurb on stanford's and U of V's policies policies (Taken from here, speaking of plagiarizing :P )
[Stanford] gives students and the community full responsibility of themselves and of upholding the honor law. The university puts all the pressure of academic integrity on its students and it trusts them enough not to cheat so that the faculty is not constantly reminding them of the Code, "The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent [...] dishonesty [...]. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable, academic procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code." (S. U.) Another school where this idea of ienforcementi is put into effect is the University of Richmond in Virginia. This school lets students "leave the classroom during an exam or [...] may even take the exam home" (U. of V.). The professors trust the students because of the enforcement factor. Instead of faculty breathing down the student's neck about cheating, the student knows it is his/her responsibility not to cheat. Millersville University would benefit by adopting this honor code. The students here are trustworthy and would also benefit from the fact that they are trusted by their instructors.

There are other ways to catch plagiarism

[Aguila]

In reality, professors are going to catch plagiarism only if the student happens to copy from a source that the professor is very familiar with.

This is a valid point, no professor will be familiar with all the works out there, and hence will be unable to look at a student work and state that he's seen it before. However, this is not the only way to catch plagiarism.

One flaw in plagiarism is that each person has an individual writing style. Therefore, as long as a class requires multiple essays over the course of the semester, a professor should be able to spot plagiarism, as they should be able to look at the second paper of the semester by John Doe and see that it looks as if a different person wrote it than wrote the first paper. (Of course, this supposes that the professor is only required to teach a reasonable number of students each semester, few enough that he can be familiar with them and their writing style.) I can guarantee you that if I tried to pass off one of your essays as one of mine to a professor who I've had before, they'd spot that the plagiarized essay has a different feel, different words that the author has an affinity for, etc.

Another argument that people might raise against this method is that students may plagiarize all the essays in the course, hence the professor would not be familiar with their personal writing style, but the writing style of their plagiarized source. However, in order for the student to get away with this, the student would need the writing style of all his plagiarized essays to be the same. This would be very difficult to do, unless the essay topics are very generic. If the esay topics are somewhat specific, than it would be difficult to find one author/source that can appropriately answer all the essays. Additionally, if this is a major concern, I would just require ONE of the essays to be in class. That essay would provide a standard for determining each student's writing style.

Additionally, people might point out that in today's litigious world, a professor might be able to spot plagiarism using this method, but not to prove it. However, once a professor spots an essay using this method, then he can begin searching for the source using Google, etc.

Removing your site from Turnitin.com's database?

[securitas]

Has anyone here had any experience with getting Turnitin.com to remove your site from their database - and prove that they have done so? We just noticed that their bot appears to have done a complete crawl and sucked in our entire site. This violates our terms of service (not to mention copyright) since Turnitin.com is a commercial entity.

If Turnitin wants to pay to use our content that's one thing, but just taking it for their own commerical exploitation without any compensation is completely another.

I'm not sure trust is the issue

[HangingChad]

What ever happened to trust?

Hard to tell if trust is the real issue or if your first comment was more telling. One thing for sure, I'm getting seriously tired of this republican attitude of guilty until proven innocent. And that bubbles over into a lot of areas. Check points on roads that inconvenience everyone to check for a few people who have been drinking. Drug testing is another great example. Invade everyone's privacy to weed out few bad actors...one that strangely hasn't affected the actual level of drug use in this country. Software activation inconveniences everyone looking for a few pirates, and where is the payoff? Activation was supposed to lower prices to the consumer. Anyone seen lower prices? So that was bullshit. The DRM arguements are recycled bullshit. Finger printing and photgraphing millions of people looking for a handful of terrorists...more bullshit.

Guess I'm wondering when we started to just accept this crap as part of the program? Have we turned into such pussies that we feel those things are somehow okay?

At First Blush

[DumbSwede]

At first blush it seems to be a good argument "so and so is making money off my work without my permission"
Last time I looked, the college itself is making money off other people's work in general, and your only compensation is a diploma (assuming you finish).

I'm unaware of any prohibition of the schools making a students work public, though they may have to take pains to make sure the author's name is removed. So if they put this work on the web, aren't search engines making a profit off this work? That is a battle that has already been fought and lost.

All of that is an aside. The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever works you produce. When I was in college, I constantly heard grumbles (far more justified) about professors assigning graduate students programming tasks that the professors would collect and string into marketable products. At the University of Illinois professors are allowed to profit from side projects, though this is not true for all universities.

As for fear of false positives, that would be a legitimate complaint if the plaggerism detector merely turned back a yeah/nay response. The article says it returns a fitness number of originality. I would assume when the number gets too low, you the teacher can request the most offending example that it was supposedly plagereized from. Now it becomes a human decision again, by comparing the two papers. I would also imagine this side by side check would only be done on students whose papers consistently come back with low fitness numbers. Assuming this is the way it is applied, I don't have much of a problem with it. The alternative is to just realize that good plagerizers will get the same grades on essays as everyone else, now that so much searchable material is available on the web.

Re:At First Blush

[willtsmith]

All of that is an aside. The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever works you produce. When I was in college, I constantly heard grumbles (far more justified) about professors assigning graduate students programming tasks that the professors would collect and string into marketable products. At the University of Illinois professors are allowed to profit from side projects, though this is not true for all universities.

Full time grad students in tech fields are PAID to go to school. So your works literally are "works for hire".

The fact that the prof gets rights over the university is between U Illinois and their faculty. It's likely part compensation for the fact that most of them could go into industry and make double their academic salary.

Re:At First Blush

[Hatta]

I'm unaware of any prohibition of the schools making a students work public

It's called copyright law.

The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever you produce.

Unless you have a stipend or work/study arrangement you are a customer of the university, not an employee.

The problem and the solution

[caesar79]

I have been a teaching assistant for over 3 years and it is no secret that plagiarism is a fact of life.

The problem is that the assignments handed out are overly broad. Instead, I believe the solution is to significantly narrow down the problem, so that it is more or less unique. You may find it on the net, but u'll spend more time getting it to conform to the requirements.

For e.g., instead of asking for the effects of globalization on world economy (or some such thing), ask them for effects of globalization on THEIR life. u get the idea...

cheat testers are good

[sklib]

A lot of the programming classes at umich have projects graded by an autograder -- specifically you run a script to submit your code, then it compiles it, and runs a bunch of tests to make sure the behavior is right. One of the features of this system is that it checks your submission against every other submission (even past semesters) for that project to see copied pieces of code, even detecting stuff like copies with renanmed variables. And of course every year, we'd hear about groups of people getting caught with all-too-similar code, all with the same set of bugs, etc -- obvious offenders.

I went through this class after class, and it was never a problem for me, because although i trust myself not to cheat, I don't trust others. If other people are getting the same grades as I am without any of the effort, then the grades mean nothing, because they don't separate people based on what they know. Now, sure, my stuff was all programs, and their stuff is papers or something, but in the end what is the difference? The kids that refused to submit their stuff are just spoiled brats looking for attention, and not focused on learning anything.

We're not producing sausages here!

[Bopper]

It used to be that learning was a serious endeavor, between a professor and a student, a master and an apprentice. Your final exam was an oral one, and the purpose was for the professor to determine whether you had absorbed the material sufficiently, and the result was a pass or fail for the student.

As testing becomes more mechanized and impersonal, it opens the door for fraud of all sorts. You can try to stem the fraud with technology, but nothing can stop a student from hiring an expert to write an original essay for them, or even a thesis.

If society really cares about the quality of the output of universities, then funding should be improved, class sizes reduced, and a more personal approach taken to teaching. Automated fraud detection is not going to save the university, in fact, it just shows how much in trouble it really is.

Re:Sumbit PDF with images

[Carmody]

I remember being asked to submit a paper electronically once. I happily compiled by printing the paper, and then scanning it at low DPI into a PDF file without using OCR. They couldn't say anything because they asked for it in 'electronic format' without specifying further.

How proud you are! You were able to deliberately make someone's life more difficult, and I'm sure you bragged about it to your friends, and they smiled and told you how "cool" you were that you made things tougher on a grown-up.

A professor has a certain amount of time, and many professional duties. Scholarship, teaching, and service. By asking you to submit things electronically, the professor was hoping to spend more time doing what you are paying him for, reading your work carefully. But yes, by finding a loophole, you were able to take his time away from grading the smart kids' papers so he could read your smartass paper.

And now you brag about it in slashdot. Someday you may be an adult in a position where you are asking for results from somebody, and I hope you don't have to deal with "You didn't say they couldn't be in base 8" "You didn't say they had to be in English" "You didn't say I couldn't smear excrement on them first"

It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.

Where's the license?

[mr3038]

If I check my paper agains plagiarism, will it be added to their database or not? I'm fine with the prof checking my paper with whatever software or service he wants but I would hate if I were required to use a commercial service myself to "proof" that my work is original. Double so, if the license for the service required me to give rights to distribute my work via the service.

As I can see it, I return my paper to the prof and because I have the copyright to the paper, it cannot be stored by some for-profit-company unless I license it. Perhaps I should hand out my paper to the prof with a written license that he can use it as required for grading it but the paper may not be redistributed. If this web service doesn't allow comparing the paper without adding the content to their database, then the prof cannot use this service. If, on the other hand, the service allows checking papers without adding the content to the database, I can see absolutely no reason why the prof shouldn't be allowed to use the service if he feels that it's the most effective way to work. If the professor or the university pays the bill, of course.

Re:Class, repeat after me...offshoring

[Ruds]

Yes, because grading is the only individual attention a student gets. And coursework is the only value of a college education.

People pay tuition because high-quality employers (and graduate schools) prefer candidates who come from prestigious four-year universities. A degree (and high GPA) from such a university indicates:
(1) The student excelled at the coursework. This is the bare minimum, and can be provided by any university; however, most employers prefer the guarantee of rigor and a reasonable breadth and depth that is provided by a prestigious school.
(2) The student was mature enough to do well at the coursework while at the same time living away from home for the first time (in most cases). Again, this can be provided by most four-year schools, but the more prestigious the school, the more of an accomplishment this is presumed to be (with good reason--the culture at, say, MIT, requires a much faster maturation than, say, the local community college; whether that's a good thing is another question, but adaptability is certainly a virtue prized by employers and grad schools).
(3) The student was exposed to and had (the opportunity for) contact with some of the finest minds on the planet, and presumably to their research. This is especially important for graduate school. This is not accomplished primarily in the classroom, but through one-on-one conversations in office hours, small discussion sections or reading groups, and undergraduate research.

As to your second question, India already has hundreds of campuses with extremely competitive admissions standards; a reason that skilled, educated workers are available in India is that a large number of Indians are highly educated, most in India, not the U.S.

The real problem with this is...

[Art_Vandelai]

that if I write an essay or a term paper, it should belong to me. I should not have to give up my ability to profit from (either to get a higher mark in class, or provide the knowledge and theories that I have researched to build upon or profit from at a later date.

Students who hand in their essays automatically give up their rights to their work to turnitin.com. This company is assembling a massive database of content, which can then be turnd around and sold to businesses for big bucks, without giving credit to the students who created the material. These guys are worse than the RIAA is when it comes down to compensating the creators for their efforts.

Maybe I can sue them?

[BigDish]

I absolutely hate TurnItIn.com, but sadly many teachers at my school use it. I have never cheated in my life, but as others have mentioned, I feel I have to prove my innocence.
I'm wondering if I have legal grounds to sue them, as every paper I have submitted to them has had the following attached to the bottom:
Copyright (C)2003-2004 (My Name). All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized use, reproduction or storage, either electronic or printed, in whole or in part, without written or verbal permission, is a violation of international copyright laws.
Permission for TurnItIn.com and/or iParadigms.com to retain a copy of this work for more than 14 days, or to incorporate this work into their database(s) is explicitly DENIED.
They have terms and conditions people automatically agree to when they use TurnItIn.com, it would seem my terms for them receiving my papers would be valid, as they will obviously ignore them and retain my papers.

I go to McGill...

[BSDevil]

...and can clear a few things up.

Firstly, the use of Turnitin.com is very rare at McG. In fact, the prof for this class is one of only two profs in the whole school that make using the site mandatory. Apparently this prof is the only one that thinks we're all rabid cheaters.

Secondly, although the article dosen't say it, the case was won in a domestic McGill instiution. As of the fall (when this was big news), the saga of Jesse Rosenfeld had moved beyond the negociations with the prof, to the point where he was about to file a J(udicial)-Board complaint. Seeing as the J-Board, however, takes somewhere in the matter of a year to get anything done, it was time for another round of negociations, this time between Jesse, the prof, the departement, and Student Advocacy which got the solution.

Oh yeah, and this was after five or six articles in both Campus papers, as well as the backing of the Undergrad Student Society and the Postgrad Student Society.

So way to go Jesse. Although I'm personally not a fan of you, you won one for the little guy.

Cheating is rampant in the university system

[bigbadbob0]

Cheating in the university system right now is absolutely ridiculous. As a computer science student at one of the University of California systems finest, I find that some large percentage of senior-level computer science students couldn't write code to save their lives. They have made it through all 4 years by cheating on their programming assignments.

Even more disturbing is the fact that these cheaters, when caught, get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. They are not kicked out of the school, the department or even the major. They are sent on their way with a note made on their "permanent record."

I'm quite sure that cheating is just as bad in other departments/majors as well. Something should be done about this.

Turnitin's legal statement

[Facekhan]

Turnitin.com has a legal opinion they had written up to explain the issues with what they do. In the opinion they admit that some aspects, particularly the archiving and the commercial (for-profit) use of other's work is not necesarily covered by fair use.
http://turnitin.com/static/legal/Legal_Docum ent.pd f

warning pdf file, your eyes may bleed.

It is NOT the same as random drug testing

[hross]

This testing is NOT the same as random drug testing.

The problem is at least two fold:

1) The testing company keeps the submitted essay and then uses it to test further submissions. They are now using the submitted essay for their own profit, and the student is effectively forced to allow this.

The equivalent drug test would be where the blood/urine sample has a value on a secondary market and the original owner loses the right to dictate how this sample is used.

2) Also, there are many procedural issues that relate to plagiarism that make the issue worse. It has been defacto at McGill that if you submit group work and one contributor has plagairised - intentionally or not - then all members of the group are held accountable. Teams often divide work for efficiency. To then require that every team member vet every other member's work is simply impossible in theory and impractical in general.

The equivalent drug test would be to ban everyone on any team that has had any member fail a drug test. For people caught in this net, the heavy-handed practise feels unfair and indefensible.

For people with professional standing (e.g. accountants) this has long reaching impact far beyond some elective where a team member missed citations.

In practise, it can seem like the guilt by association with a death penalty.

[SOT]: their crawler

[SavannahLion]

On that business about the Cyveillance bot being ill behaved. Did anybody else find it strange that they use a robots.txt and their contact information is a free yahoo.com address?

I guess it's OK for Cyveillance to harass everyone else, but we're not to harass them. :-\

Cs majors

[minus_273]

I think every CS major already knows about this. We have been doing it here at my school for year now. Wonderful apps like Moss do agreat job of finding people who have stolen other people's work
Move along, nothing new.

Is this a Breach of Contract??

[serutan]

IANAL, but to me this looks like a clear breach of contract. When students pay to take a class, the deal includes an evaluation by the teacher. Otherwise they are merely auditing the class, which they can usually do for free. Simply marking the work with a zero is not an evaluation, at least not by any competent definition. Students who have paid to take a class shouldn't additionally be required to forfeit something to an outside vendor in order to receive a grade.

Come to think of it, the anti-plagiarism service seems very parallel to what record companies have been doing for a century. Musicians don't don't make money from record sales because of the expenses that are routinely deducted from their royalties, leaving zero. They get a chance to achieve fame while the record company makes money from their work. Students get a chance to achieve a good grade, and the anti-plagiarism service makes money by adding the students' work to their database without having to pay for it.

Does turnitin infringe copyright?

[mx80]

turnitin has a pretty interesting analysis of whether they infringe on the copyright of the student who submit the papers.

Aren't you so high, mighty, and noble.

[xtal]

It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.

In my many years of experience in education, I have come across miserable people. Some of those miserable people were/are in a position of incredible power over the future of their students. To stick it to these people, in however small a way, is immensely satisfying - especially if you do it with their own asinine rules.

You will see a similar situation in prisons where inmates will use whatever techniques are at their disposal to make life difficult for their keepers.

Suffice it to say there probably was a reason for all the extra effort put into this "electronic copy". There are miserable people everywhere in this world, on both sides of the fence.

A difficult subject

[sadangel]

I was a TA for a C programming class just last semester. With all the programs I had to grade, it was unrealistic for me to be able to detect cheating without help. I submitted papers to the free-as-in-beer MOSS program at UC Berkeley. The system doesn't require students to hand assignments in through it and merely shows you the closest matches and lets you draw your own conclusions. It's an impressive piece of work and it doesn't make anyone any money by my use of it.
To my extreme dismay, the system brought up submissions by two students that grew progressively more similar as the semester progressed until it became obvious they were not original. Possibly the hardest thing I have ever done was to report these students to the professor. They admitted to it and both failed the class as a result. It still pains me to think that I had a part in causing them so much grief, but I still believe I did the right thing. If nothing is done to prevent this, it betrays the students who work hard to produce their own work. The value of a degree goes down as well as the integrity of the institution if anyone with money to buy assignments or skilled friends can do just as well as those who learn these skills on their own.

Still, I'm glad I got a research position this semester where I will not have to play such a disciplinary role.