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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
The owls are not what they seem
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.
Winged Power Photography
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
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!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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 (=
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).
sounds exactly like slashdot!