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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."
Has SCO used this to run Linux through it yet?
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?
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?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
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?
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.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
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.
The owls are not what they seem
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.
Make cheese not war 8:)
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
"Im drowning here, and you're describing the water!"
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?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
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.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
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.
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.
we could force people to use this service before posting on /., maybe we wouldn't have to wade through so many duplicate posts.
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.
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.
Winged Power Photography
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.
/. Where the truth
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.
My blog
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
:-)...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).
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
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
Firsts0rz :-D
This sentence has been detected as being plagiarised from:
Anonymous Coward
Grade: F-
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Three Squirrels
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!
HAHA Injured Hippies
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!
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.
Why might students not want their essays stored in a company database?
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
...'" but his name wasn't Frank, or the highschool student who accidentally stapled a printout of his source website to his paper.)
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
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.
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...
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.
Because we all know that software to recognize patterns in text is perfect. That's why no one ever gets spam anymore!
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
o 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.
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.p
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.
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.
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.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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.
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.
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 (=
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.
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.
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.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
God is real unless declared integer
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.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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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....
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).
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
sounds exactly like slashdot!