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Competition Seeks Best Approaches To Detecting Plagiarism
marpot writes "Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation."
Here's an insightful fact related to this article:
Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy
Does your school/university check your homeworks/theses for plagiarism? Nowadays, probably Yes, but are they doing it properly? Little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we conduct a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored by Yahoo! We have set up a corpus of artificial plagiarism which contains plagiarism with varying degrees of obfuscation, and translation plagiarism from Spanish or German source documents. A random plagiarist was employed who attempts to obfuscate his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations, e.g., shuffling, deleting, inserting, or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is created using machine translation
Not only will my solution find those rascally cheaters in record time, it will also determine that all others in the competition have copied my work.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Simply disallow the use of words.
Vice President Biden, are you listening???
I think the hardest plagiarism to spot is one where you copy the main idea but you put everything into your own sentence. The main reason is that semantics is still an open problem in AI.
Oesday ouryay oolschay/universitysay eckchay ouryay omeworkshay/esesthay orfay agiarismplay?
As long as your prof accepts foreign language papers, you're golden. Or, find a paper that you want to rip off written in German/French/Spanish/whatever and dump it through babelfish:
Your school/university controls your homeworks/teses plagiat?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Given that many, many teachers give out broadly similar assignments all over the country, how many years it will be until most possible ways of talking, say, of what Dante meant in a certain canto in the Inferno, will be in the database and will make it impossible to write a paper without being suspected of plagiarizing? Especially if the system runs with a very low threshold (say, 3-4 words in a row that are the same = plagiarizing)
It would really be interesting if all the published books on one particular subject (again, say, the Divine Comedy) were submitted to this service and a check was run about just how much 'plagiarizing' and 'original thinking' there is going around...
Now, I understand that plagiarism is common among the weakest of undergrad writers; but "machine translation from Spanish or German source documents" and "random text operations" seem like unrealistic experimental stimuli.
In order to be a success, a plagiarized paper has to survive scrutiny by automated systems, if any are deployed, and human graders, if any are paying attention. Machine translation and text mangling should trivially defeat automated systems, at least any that aren't cranked well into World o' false positives territory; but would they pass human scrutiny? Even if they did, handing in something produced by machine translation and text mangling would probably earn you a referral to "Remedial English 101 For Life".
if you submit enough essays to a plagerism database wouldn't you eventually run into every paper submited turning up as plagerised? that's what i never understood about english departments buying into this let it go for a few decades and if they decide to copyright there databases and make them publicly available that could be a funny buisness model though
Accuse me of plagiarism and I'll publish a book about that little matter involving you and a pawnbroker.
Copy and paste some of the text of the suspected document into Google. If something with the same or similar wording comes up, it's plagiarized. Simple.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Award
Yahoo! Research will award a cash prize of 500 Euros to the winner of the competition.
Wow, 500 Euros for solving a problem that every single college in the world would pay good money to have? Sounds like a gyp for the guy who wins.
"Yeah, thanks for spending time and effort to solve this complex problem. Here's your 500 Euros. Now we're going to go sell that pants off of this and make millions. Have a nice day!"
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Just imagine everyone's surprise when all the entrants turn in the exact same process.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I thought detecting design wasn't science. I guess that only applies if we don't like the implications of a possible "yes." Otherwise, it can be science.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It's always going to be possible to plagarise but as long as it's more difficult that actually writing original work it's not so much of a problem. Translating from a foreign language (even with the help of an automatic translator) is probably more work than just writing the work yourself. Swapping a whole bunch of words probably also requires comparable effort if you don't want it too sound too silly.
Just go to the University of Delaware. The penalty for plagiarism is the vice-presidency.
When George Harrison wrote the song "My Sweet Lord" for his solo debut album, he accidentally plagiarized a Ronald Mack song. He ended up losing a million dollar lawsuit over it. What should he have done to avoid plagiarizing any of the millions of songs that had been written before then?
A while back I worked on a program to find duplicated code - CPD (copy/paste detector). It discards comments and whitespace and (optionally) normalizes variable names... but probably wouldn't deal well with tokens being moved around. There's a chapter on it in my PMD book, too.
What was interesting were some of the performance optimizations that folks came up with. My first version used JavaSpaces to distribute the computation - but subsequent versions (thanks to Brian Ewins and Steve Hawkins) were fast enough to run on one just machine. Good times.
The Army reading list
A plagiarised paper just smells bad, and is characterized by shifts in voices and writing styles, sudden ignorance of the the critical points raised earlier. The same author who can't write a grammatically correct sentence one moment is throwing down complex constructions the next The harder part is identifying the source of the plagiarism. For undergraduate papers, even the harder part is trivial. After all, the point of plagiarism is that the author is too lazy to write anything original.
For academics (professors), the situation isn't all that different. Plagiarism is usually a mix of stupidity, laziness and pressure to get stuff done. It usually happens where big, popularizing authors try to rip off the obscure ones (go back twenty years a la Mr. Ambrose, or pick something in a different language, preferably Italian), or when someone needs a book in an obscure field, and tries to pirate something really obscure.
Even so, if a plagiarist has enemies who give a damn, they can find the source fairly fast. So why construct a test for the most obfuscated cases, when a plagiarist clever enough to obfuscate could simply write something original and sufficiently clever?
The patent office should use something like this! Even a simple algorithm should be able to weed out many invalid applications.
This isn't a particularly good test of plagiarism detection at all, since the data corpus is computer generated. Real-world plagiarism detection needs to take account of subject matter (correct answers to a physics paper will be less diverse than ones on wide ranging literary topics) and allowable duplication, such as quotations, restatement of the question, citations of sources, etc.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
... use the same system the US Patent Office uses for finding prior art.
On second thought, scratch that idea.
Have gnu, will travel.
Calculate an md5 hash of the paper, if it matches the md5 of another, it's plagiarized.
This is a contest to find and expert on plagiarism. If you're a so-called expert and win, sell your software to somebody else and make another 500 Euro.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
It's a monkeys on a typewriter thing. these companies add papers to there database as they compare them. If you feed enough papers into a database eventually they will all come back plagiarized there are not an infinite number of possible term papers there are only so many things that could be written for a topic that make sense, and most English teachers recycle topics. why English departments buy into this I don't understand let it go for long enough(it would only take another decade or two at most) and you will start getting people who didn't even know they were plagiarizing getting kicked out of college, I'm not talking about improper citations I'm talking about guy in Washington has the same idea as a guy in New York 20 years later. I'm not a lawyer, so i don't know if this is possible, but couldn't they copyright these databases in some form or render them proprietary. If they did that there business model could change to just collecting royalties.
Cheating is pretty easy to detect. I have written cheating detection programs and used them successfully. It is actually surprising how well any sort of longest common subsequence comparison will do in spite of any changes students make. It is always up to a human instructor to verify anything if an accusation is to be made. That being said, cheaters usually produce crappy work anyway. I would have to say that at least in computer science courses you need to be quite talented to get past any of the methods I have designed. Usually more talent is required than simply doing the assignment well. I think cheating is just something humans need to give up on. Like chess, checkers, and properly enforced financial fraud; computers have us beat.
Hard to detect in an academic paper, but easy to find on the web. Go to almost any Wikipedia article and you'll find it right there in front of you. Especially any article on a movie -- almost are are ripped directly from imdb.
"Does your school / university check your homework / theses for plagiarism? Today, probably yes, but they do it right? If little is known about plagiarism detection accuracy, which is why we have a competition on plagiarism detection, sponsored Yahoo! We have an artificial body of plagiarism plagiarism, with varying degrees of concealment and plagiarism translation from Spanish or German source documents. plagiarist was random, trying to disguise his plagiarism with random sequences of text operations such as mixing, deleting, inserting or replacing a word. Translated plagiarism is with machine translation. "
I once was on a Fido forum with someone who would often write responses nearly word-for-word identical to mine. It was uncanny; I'd see his post and recognize my own writing, only to realize it wasn't mine. Timestamps would sometimes show my post was written first, sometimes his. I imagine some others on the forum thought at least one of us was a sock puppet, but neither of us was.
(If he's on slashdot, he's probably composing a post just like this one)
That probably happens rarely. But build a big enough database, and it will happen often. Particularly given the restricted problem domains in undergraduate papers. It's not just a computer problem; even humans will think "plagiarism" when they see two papers with similar ideas and similar turns of phrase. Which I think demonstrates that plagiarism cannot be established satisfactorily merely by showing similarity between papers.
Just ask Mike Flores, he is the world's foremost plagiarism detective.
Plagiarism is a symptom of professors only being involved in the last step: reviewing the final product.
Require the students to submit multiple drafts. Meet with them for 15 minutes each and discuss their thought processes on the ongoing paper. You'll get better final products, teach people not to procrastinate, and smoke-out people who have no involvement in their "own work."
What, can't do that because you have 60 students in a class? Well, there's part of the problem too.
We're trying to find a technology solution to a problem with less student-teacher interaction. Typical!
Law enforcement uses automated fingerprint detection to identify possible matches. It never claims a match based on the computer.
Using a program as the sole plagiarism judge and jury is profoundly unfair. If a university wants to discipline a student for a plagiarism hit, then it needs to obtain the source document--and pay the source document's creator if necessary to obtain it.
Confronting the student with the alleged source gives the student a fair chance to defend himself/herself.
Seriously, the humanities are in trouble. With over 6 billion people on the planet, it's extremely difficult to have an original thought. This sets the stage for endless repetition. Add to that the fact that the very process of teaching the humanities usually means imparting a teacher's single interpretation of the source material to the students who then do the natural thing when it comes to writing a paper and parrot back to the teacher what they've heard, knowing that's the only way to get a good grade, and the resulting combination is deadly.
The papers are all going to be similar from the beginning, because it's a rare instructor who actually encourages dissenting opinions (and that fault in teaching is a whole other discussion of its own). Then the papers are going to be similar because there really are only so many ways to interpret the source material that are defensible. And finally, the papers are heavily likely to be similar to at least one other paper written about the subject, when every paper ever written on the subject is considered (exactly what the plagiarism sites attempt to do).
I think the problem this competition is trying to solve is intractable in the face of the current educational system. It's gotten to the point where, if the software considers a large enough number of sources, even the instructor's own papers are going to look like plagiarism.
Hell, look at the Slashdot comment system. A million people read the front page, but only a few thousand post comments. Thousands more are content to simply moderate the comments, and face it, comments they agree with are more likely to be modded up, one way or another. Then compare the modded comments. We get a lot of duplicate or near duplicate thought, and hence near duplicate comments on every article. Why? Because when you get enough people together in one place, discussing the same subject in writing, there are only so many viewpoints and only so many comments that won't get modded down for being of the "cubic what?" variety.
Time to go back to grading on spelling and grammar. We've reached the end of the grading on ideas road. Coherency of presentation is all we have left. (One could argue it's all we ever had.)
Here's a good article explaining how Google makes plagiarism detection easy: http://questioncopyright.org/node/4 There was a story a couple years ago about one of these plagiarism detection services, Turnitin, getting sued for copyright infringement... does anyone know if that went anywhere? http://education.zdnet.com/?p=953
What generally happens once the plagiarism is detected; are these students failed or disciplined?
Is plagiarism enough of a misdemeanour to warrant expulsion? There are many facets to the educational systems but I believe the main priority is to educate. Would a student who could prove proficiency in his studies but is incredibly lazy (I know _many_ people like this for some reason) be eligible for failure or expulsion for turning in a paper that ranked to high for plagiarism testing?
If this was a contest for open source software, the winner would get zero Euros.
Seriously, if the teachers don't have the time to identify it and the students are hell bent on doing it... let it happen. Perhaps that's the only way these people will learn anything about the subject matter anyway.
And when they graduate, get a job, and completely fail... that'll be a nice wake up call. Sure, some will succeed (PHBs, anyone?)... but I doubt catching them in school would change the end result much.
Face it, some problems aren't worth the time it takes to solve them, especially when you're approaching them the wrong way from the start.
Queue: whining about how it'll make schools/univeristies look bad when their students fall on their faces in the real world. (I think I'm gonna cry)
Plagiarism is a symptom of professors only being involved in the last step: reviewing the final product.
Require the students to submit multiple drafts. Meet with them for 15 minutes each and discuss their thought processes on the ongoing paper. You'll get better final products, teach people not to procrastinate, and smoke-out people who have no involvement in their "own work."
What, can't do that because you have 60 students in a class? Well, there's part of the problem too.
We're trying to find a technology solution to a problem with less student-teacher interaction. Typical!
I never taught a class involving humanities paper writing (in the science classes I taught, I could detect borrowed work by asking our kids to explain the calculations in their presentations and reports), but my wife meets with students several at least once after they turn in a required outline and bibliography to her. The bibliography, meeting, and my wife's extensive knowledge of scholarship in her field have made plagiarism rare and very obvious. Also, they make the students write vastly better papers and learn a lot more. Even having students meet with a TA to discuss paper ideas and progress is a huge help, and required outlines, drafts, and (especially) bibliographies should be part of the writing process in every lower level undergrad class. In upper level classes, the meeting is sufficient.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
This is a useful mechanism for search engines, which need to distinguish original content from hundreds or thousands of blogs echoing it. Imagine the Web with all the duplicate, repetitive material ignored. No wonder Yahoo is supporting this. Someone over there is thinking.
The next contest will be to see who can write an automated paper generator that fools the plagiarism detector.
I realize that plagiarism detection represents an interesting problem in computer science, and that it goes some distance toweard solving a serious problem. However, I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, behind a paywall, alas, which leads me to believe that it is only a partial solution to academic dishonesty. The article suggested that, thanks to the Internet, the costs of human capital are now so low that hiring a ghostwriter to compose one's papers, sidestepping the problem of plagiarism to begin with, is far more expedient than plagiarism itself. It described a Russian-"businessman"-headed network of Filipino paper-writers, most paid between $1 and $3 a page, who are able to market their services to the West through a web site and remote call centers. At $20/page to the end-user, with no possibility of plagiarism detection, I think that most desperate students would find this a good deal. In my opinion, ghostwriting will supplant plagiarism as time goes on.
What is a teacher to do? In-class writing samples would seem to be the only hope of detecting ghostwriting. Students could, of course, argue that at home, they can "polish" their papers, and that therefore they will not resemble the in-class samples. Moreover, checking samples against papers is a thankless and time-consuming task which is only a preliminary to actually evaluating the work. Perhaps there is a computer-based solution to this, but, in the meantime, perhaps potential ghostwriting customers could take their desires to their logical conclusion, and simply buy their degrees on the Internet directly.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Or do it the old-fashioned way. I did a three year degree at Oxford. Lectures were strictly optional. Tutorials were initially compulsory, but if you could convince your tutor you didn't need them they could be dropped.
But none of this matters, because the degree I received at the end was based on 24 hours of exams. Course work, plagiarized or not, was irrelevant.
Most of my college papers had exactly one draft written the night before they were due with bibliography. Most of them received a B or better.
I do however agree that more student-teacher interaction would be a better solution to this problem. Teaching is a "labor" intensive task in that it optimizes at some small number of students per teacher. I do not believe that technology is capable of changing that to a significant degree.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'd maintain a database of all writing assignments submitted by a student over their college career. I remember an assignment in my CSCI classes that used an algorithm based on Euclidean distances and a count-table for each word to compare documents, so even using a simple metric would probably work well.
Since this method would be based on vocabulary, studying for tests like the GRE vocab section may through it off, since someone could conceivably rapidly change their vocabulary, and through off the system.
I think the best way to end plagiarism is a very visible deterrent. If you are submitting all your assignments into a database, which does some checking that is transparent (publicly scrutable), it would probably be a very fair and viable deterrent.
The best way to do this is probably to have a cache of all likely possible sources from which the material could be copied, and who else has that but google? Other search engines, of course... Your major limiting factor is that there's only so many ways to say the same thing. At some point, if you collect enough sample papers, you're going to discover that every paper actually on the topic can only be made up of so many possible phrases :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Computer Science department at my uni routinely scans final year dissertations using automated software. Mine was flagged up as "possibly plagiarised"; a significant amount of content could be found elsewhere on the web (can't remember the exact percentage).
My project supervisor said when he got the email from the system saying it came back positive he was very surprised - given the small amount of research in the area (there are only 5 or 6 papers on the same topic that I am aware of), and no other research on that exact method of solving the problem .
When I found this out I was more than a little worried - I wasn't aware of copying any other work . It turns out that it had picked up on stupid stuff, like the boilerplate at the beginning of the dissertation, or phrases like "In conclusion,", and nothing longer than 3 or 4 words in any paragraph.
This sort of plagiarism detection that detects word shuffling is fine for people that REALLY don't have a clue (i.e. the ones that forget to change the @author javadoc tag when copying their friends Java coursework), but it would still be relatively trivial to change enough words in a sentence to fool the system.
If you have graded more than 2 assignments in your life, and really read each and every paper, and provided good critical feedback, then it is really easy to spot a plagiarized paper.
Also, a grader usually knows the subject matter and has read many other good and bad works on the subject. You can get a feel for a person's writing style and depth of knowledge on a subject in just a few sentences. Then when you "smell something fishy", then it usually is.
So far, whenever I "smell something fishy" I try to find the best sentence near the fishiness and paste it into Google. Plagiarists are not going to rewrite every sentence, if they do, then they probably learned something anyway. No, plagiarists are just lazy and in a hurry and deep down they know they deserve to be caught.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
If you're on the other side of the equation, as a student, save your drafts.
If you are ever wrongly accused of plagiarism (or for that matter, copyright infringement), having several earlier versions of a paper, along with outlines, notes, etc., will work greatly in your favor.
Not only that, but it also allows to see the progression in your work, and can double as a backup in case something goes catastrophically wrong with your current document.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
They are trying to invalidate plagarism detection software by proving that you can still manage to plagarise in a way it won't detect (false negative). The thing is, this isn't the problem with plagarism software, the real problem is where it detects plagarism when none in fact took place (false positive). This will happen in a few ways:
1) There have been several highly publicized incidents where students have been in big trouble for plagarising their own work. This is ludicrous, they wrote it in the first place!
2) A large enough database of phrases, paragraphs, etc. will eventually encompass the majority of ways of phrasing a particular idea, therefore when discussing an existing idea the odds of saying something that has been said before will eventually approach certainty.
Now this wouldn't necessarilly apply if you were inventing a whole new concept, but in most classes that is not what you are being asked to do, instead you are asked to research how something has already been done. There is bound to be duplication here, especially as the database grows. This doesn't mean you plagarised something, merely that someone else has worded something similarily in the past. (For it to be plagarism you would have had to have seen and copied that earlier work, in this case you may not even know about it.)
And the Postmodernism Generator?
You don't have to write much of anything at all. Would you get a good grade? Fuck no. Would they FLUNK YOU FOR IT? Fuck no. Because its graded by untenured faculty who have to curry favour with students, or its graded by Grad Assistants who don't give a shit, and why should they.
Oh, look, a paper by Cindy Bleethstain. She's a fucking idiot. Let's see. Hmmmm. Yup. Incomprehensible bullshit, as usual. Give her a C+ because some of it is intelligible and kind of funny.
Oh, look another paper by Guido LeDouchebag. Bottlecaps are smarter than this turnip. Hmmm. Yup. More incomprehensible bullshit. C+. At least he finally discovered the spellchecker.
THAT'S what it is often like, unfortunately.
I read the paper, and if there is a passage that is noticeably different in tone, I'll copy past a section into Google and see where they pulled it. 9 times out of 10, it's a direct lift from a web page, unattributed. I send it back, and tell them "Footnotes, please. Also, automatic single grade loss. right off the top."
If it comes back still broken, then I nail 'em for plagiarism. It's a big deal, and requires paperwork I don't like to fill out...
So far I've only had one student have the cajones to not bother fixing their attributions, and he got crucified by the Ethics board. He was an arrogant little prick, too.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It was actually discussed on Slashdot just a few days ago.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I was talking to a comp sci proof who uses plagarism software to detect copied source programs. Claims it detects common ruses like transposition, reformatting, and variable renaming. The school suspends for rest of year if claim is verified.
Some professors now encourage group programming projects because that is how it works in the real world.
To those who are saying it's nearly impossible to phrase an original thought I totally agree. To those saying the phrasing is always, I beg to differ. Think of all the quotes from movies or quotes attributed to guys like Mark Twain or another famous person. Don't you all know someone (or several) who manage to botch those quotes all the time? I know I've managed to come up with 12 different ways to say lines from my favorite movies.
For my graduate class in Information Systems Security, I had to write a 20+ page paper in conjunction with the final. Each year my professor runs each paper through a program he wrote that compares each word, sentence, and paragraph from that years papers as well as every other paper he has ever collected. This is in addition to using http://turnitin.com/. He said a normal paper with excerpts and such typically runs between 10 and 15%. He doesn't start hardcore examining them until they hit about 20%. My paper had a 2% hit rate, which was the lowest he'd seen in awhile. I'm not a phenomenal writer, but I hate repetitive phrasing and similar constructions. It was mostly just a lot of editing and correcting, but it can definitely be done.
My submission - Test our children.
To prove someone is not faking, lying, cheating is to put them to the test.
There goes my thesis..
Actually the problem is our institutionalization of education.
Somewhere along the line, the educational systems became gate keepers to jobs so to speak.
Can't be a doctor without first doing well in school, getting accepted into a medical school... ...
So grades are of prime importance as that is how the educational system ranks people. Otherwise, we could ALL be doctors and earn big bucks, we could ALL be lawyers and earn big bucks, we could all be X and earn big bucks (of course we could not ALL earn big bucks as supply would exceed demand :P ).
This stems primarily from the centralization of the economy. When the economy is centralized, there is no competition and things are not allowed to 'fail' so how are people hired? They are hired by what some regulator (the education system) decides. In a decentralized economy, anyone can practice and people are 'hired' by people choosing to purchase their services. If you don't have a product/service that people wish to have, no one gives you money and you are 'fired' so to speak.
Without the ability to freely choose what services you want, who gets the 'jobs' becomes a centralized activity where the main differentiator becomes some rating agency (that being the education system). Hence the overemphasis on grading and credentials. Students seeing the reality realize it and thus focus on how do i get good grades or pass some test as that is what leads to a job. I do not blame students one bit for gaming the system. They'll forever play this back and forth game with educations as long as the educators remain the gatekeepers in a centralized economy. Just like you cannot blame lobbyists for lobbying Washington for money... when the real problem is that Washington puts itself in a position to hand out money.
What is Washington's purpose? To hand out money... so lobbyists play that game.
What is the purpose of the education system? To be a gatekeeper for jobs... so students play that game.
Plagiarism has always been a problem. Education has never been 'pure' so to speak. However, it is at some of its highest levels today as mass numbers of people enter the educational system for the requirements of getting a job. This attitude is only getting worse and worse...
Consider Obama's plan to pay teachers with master's degrees more. Do you think teacher's are suddenly going to get better after getting their master's degree? Do you think the educational system is so good at grading that it can really bring prestige to a master's degree?
Nope, more likely all it will mean is teacher's will just get their master's degree credentials in order to get more pay. They won't be one bit more qualified or better at their jobs. All it will means is teachers will push to get their master's degree which will mean they will plagiarize and do whatever they can do get that credential.
The same scam happened in Florida a few years back where teacher's were paid more if they took additional 'courses.' Of course, they just ended up taking bogus courses. I think a few were even busted for creating fake certificates...
No kind of plagiarism detector can detect my awesome mootbloxx!!!
I did this sort of thing as a teaching assistant in a computer science class. After a student passed off a project I would pick part of the code and ask him or her what it did. The worst ever was a student with a final project that that worked perfectly, but that couldn't explain to me what a "printf" did...
"What, can't do that because you have 60 students in a class? Well, there's part of the problem too."
Hmmmm, isn't that what TAs are for? Well, at least what the TRUSTED/TRUSTWORTHY TAs are for...
Might be even interesting to have the professor's colleagues who KNOW the subject matter each forward papers from their students to make sure there is no in-school favoritism by TAs who may be sleeping with or doing/getting other favors from a challenged/weak student.
The professor should keep a secret list of colleagues who randomely get a paper so that any student trying to directly approach the "anonymous" off-campus grader/professor would immediately generate a FAIL for the student. It would be like a student trying to influence or curry favor from a test proctor...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
If I had a TA when I taught a class of 60 I would be in heaven. You are lucky to get a TA if you have 100 students in a class at my university...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Brock University conducted released statistics on turnitin results. It's interesting that the vast majority of submissions fall into not the lowest match category, but the category of more than 20 words but less than 24% match.
The easiest way to prevent plagiarism is to make your assignments specific to the class and basically plagiarism proof. Rather than just say, "write a paper about shakespeare" make the assignment more specific and require them to include some of the things that we have read in class and it takes a lot more work to plagiarize a paper. Sure a student could still plagiarize large sections but to make the paper fit the assignment they would have to tweak it or the paper will get a poor grade simply because it doesn't meet the assignment guidelines.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The students cannot fake it, if the teacher cares about them learning.
Many many many moons ago, I was a Chem. Eng. grad student. This was before the internet existed, and before my beard had turned gray. One of my duties to pay my way was supervising a lab course for undergrads, and marking the students' lab reports (they were expected to produce about 20 pages per week just on this one lab course). I insisted on interviewing them individually on their reports, where they had to explain their results and conclusions. Nobody tried faking anything twice, because it was caught immediately; they had to read up and understand the background, or they were in deep shit. That class got the highest average mark ever in the year-end exam on the associated theory (the professor was pleasantly surprised).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
From what I understand of services like this, they basically create a database of all papers submitted to their system, then use the collective average of all those papers to determine how much of any newly submitted paper is "plagerized" before adding that paper into the database.
The concern I have with such a system is that despite all of the english language's complexity, there is only a finite number of logical word combination within reason on any given topic. What happens when the system finally has samplings of every feasible word combination? Do all papers then come back flagged as plagerized, regardless of their content?
The problem grows exponentially if the system is also watching for thesaurus substitutions on top of this.
Who knows... it might even be possible to break such a system using a well-crafted Kant generator to "build" papers that are 100% unique from one another, but still using a shared database of keywords that would appear correct in context to the topic at hand.
8==8 Bones 8==8
"The tools are fairly good, but, in my experience, they'll always report 3-7% or so of your paper as plagiarized"
Plagiarism is a concept in academia based on the idea that if you are going to do something wrong, at least you should do something nobody has done before. Your professor or other academia leader decides whether your plagiarism is truly original, or only a copy of a previous plagiarism.
See Wikia for additional information.
About a year ago, a challenge against my integrity was made in the form of an accusation of plagiarism. The text in question was a term paper for an introductory Psychology course. Initially, I folded to the intimidation tactics leveled at me by a grad student perhaps overcompensating for her own inadequacies, despite my certitude that I had performed no wrongdoing. Make no mistake-I am steadfastly opposed to actual plagiarism. In my case, a technical ambiguity was wielded as a weapon by a power-hungry authoritarian to blemish my personal credibility.
The purported passage of such controversy is as follows:
'In fact, autobiographical studies of adults with AS by Attwood (2000) have indicated that some individuals with AS actively and "ingeniously" imitate and model the social behavior of others to act normal despite personal difficulties in social integration.'
Attwood, T. (2000). Strategies for improving the social integration of
children with Asperger Syndrome. Autism, 4, 85-100.
Note the inline citation, quotation around the less-common word choice, the context as simply a single contributing "factoid" in support of the undisputedly original ideas I presented in the rest of the paragraph, and the fact that the Attwood (2000) citation was flawlessly included in the "references" section at the end of the paper. The actual passage from the original article is as follows:
'Some individuals with Asperger syndrome can be quite ingenious in using imitation and modelling to camouflage their difficulties with social integration'
Attwood (2000)
I wholeheartedly admit there are common words to both passages. I also stipulate that, if no reference for Attwood had been included, the phrase would have been a clear-cut case of plagiarism. The following words are common to both phrases, and neglect quotation marks:
{Some, individuals, with, asperger, syndrome, imitate, model, difficulties, social, integration}
There is no way to paraphrase "Asperger Syndrome"; it is a named medical condition, the topic of the article and the paper, and has no relevance to plagiarism. The determiner and preposition cannot be rationally classified as plagiarism either. "Social integration" refers to a well-defined sociological event, which does not belong to Attwood exclusively, and which would be plain wrong if "reworded" just to satisfy the plagiarism pedants. Remaining word-choice-plagiarism candidates are:
{Individuals, imitate, model, difficulties}
Some would argue that these words should have been replaced with synonyms; these people are shortsighted and wrong. One might replace "imitate" and "model" with similar descriptions, such as "act out" or "mimic" or "pretend-play" or "copy" or "follow" or "replicatively reperform" or any number of absurd rewordings. In many cases, subtle word meanings are changed, and in all cases, no less plagiarism is inherent in the phrase except in the minds of bureaucratic conformists who lose the original intent among the red tape. The same applies to the words "individuals" and "difficulties". Replacing "Individuals" with "people" and "difficulties" with "challenges" would simply be expending effort to satisfy the red-tape without removing any of the original author's contributions.
The original author has been attributed for his contributions; the phrase is posed as a supporting factoid, not as literary art or poetry. When I use a thesaurus to find an uncommon word, I don't credit the thesaurus with my word choice. To claim that simply reusing an author's word choice after citing the author's ideas is plagiarism only belittles the author's contribution. Indeed, it would have been relatively trivial to transform my phrase into one which passes the formulaic plagiarism test used by my TA. In fact, such a transformation would have been formulaic itself. Consider the follow spectrum of rewordings:
Some individuals with Asperger syndrome can be quite ingenious in using imitation and modelling to camouflage their difficulties
If you're not using a human check on these tools, you're failing miserably. They're great for seeing if whole papers, or even whole paragraphs are stolen, but you absolutely have to check to see what the thing is actually flagging in order to see whether the flags make sense. A quote-heavy paper often comes back with a fairly high score, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. A woman in one of my classes freaked out because her paper came back as 70% plagiarized. It was an annotated bibliography, and it flagged the citations.
They're wonderful for giving you a better shot at catching the people who are plagiarizing, but you have to anticipate a high level of false positives.
To piggyback on this, asking students to write somewhat unique and original reports (or even parts) is often enough to kill plagiarism dead. Ask for the x10^7 report on a subject, and students will just find one of the other (x10^7 -1) reports written on the same subject. Ask them to apply that information to a slightly different scenario, and you can quickly tell who plagiarizes and who knows their stuff.
Plagiarism would die if teachers, TAs, and professors asked for unique and thoughtful reports, and were involved in the writing process. I currently teach HS science, and nobody plagiarizes any assignments I give, BECAUSE THEY CAN'T! They are unique, and have their own feel, and their own twists. I just read an essay explaining Archimedes Principle based on a princess who was wading across a stream. I know DAMN well it wasn't plagiarized, because it was a unique topic, and I was involved in the writing process.
If you're running into plagiarism, it's your fault for being lazy.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It seems like one of the major relevant questions that is overlooked when considering the topic of plagiarism is whether the writing of a 'traditional' paper is the proper vehicle for testing a students absorption of the topic at hand. In reflecting about my time as an undergrad, I can't think of a single paper I wrote that didn't boil down to busy-work. Complicated and time consuming sure, but busy-work none-the-less.
The reason is actually pretty simple... until a student is at a level where they are being asked to produce original thought on a topic (masters or Ph.D. level work, depending on the discipline being studied, or for many majors a student will never be asked to produce original thought on a topic) a large amount of the work will amount to creative regurgitation of existing thought anyway.
At that point one has to ask if the professor isn't just employing the wrong testing technique to ensure that learning is taking place (which is, usually, the ultimate goal anyway)... For example, I had several professors who skipped term papers entirely and simply made a large chunk of their 'live' tests essay based.
It would be relatively difficult to plagiarize much of anything when a student is being forced to write about the topic at length and off-the-cuff. At that point you either know what you're talking about (you learned what you were supposed to learn), or your answers suck and it becomes pretty obvious that you haven't learned the material.
Obviously for every rule there will be exceptions, but I'd be willing to bet that a very high majority of papers that are being written in any given university really amount to wasted effort for both the student and the professor anyway...
---As my daddy used to tell me: "You gotta be smart before you can be a smartass."
You know the difference in pay between a prof who schedules 15 minute meetings with each student and one who just clicks 'submit' on Turnitin? Zilch. Actually, maybe less than zilch. The prof who's reviewing drafts of student work and meeting one-on-one with students for 15-20 hours a week is spending 15-20 hours fewer a week on professional publications, which are what actually get you tenure and pay raises. You simply do not pay enough tuition to make it worth the prof's time. Or, perhaps, the administration simply wastes too much of your tuition on non-professorial costs.
it goes with today's territory. "research" consists of googling, "writing" consists of cutting and pasting, even when no actionable plagiarism is taking place.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.