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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."
The tools are fairly good, but, in my experience, they'll always report 3-7% or so of your paper as plagiarized, just because it's pretty difficult to write about _anything_ without unknowingly using previously written words. I would _hope_ that anyone who would pursue disciplinary action from such a tool's results would at least take a look to see if the sections being flagged are consequential.
I have no idea how good they are with catching paraphrasing, though... it strikes me that the semi-intelligent plagiarizers would be doing that more than a straight copy and paste. There's also the "acceptable vs unacceptable" distinction to be made.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
My wife teaches for Phoenix. Probably 90% of the plagiarism she sees is from students copying and pasting whole papers word-for-word from random cheat sites. Occasionally she'll get someone who fails to properly quote sources, but that's very much the minority. For the most part, the cheaters aren't all that bright, nor do they try to hide their cheating. They're just hoping they get away with it.
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!
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.)