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."

Comments

Who needs plagiarism?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

When you've got Markov Generators?

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