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

Re:Insightful fact...

[MickLinux]

It seems to me that your school's policy is well thought out, and appropriate. Not because cheating is okay, but because going over and above justice makes the justice highly subjective, and subject to abuse. Positive abuse, by someone finding a paper that is 3% plagiarized, and failing the student. Negative abuse, by *not* failing another student who plagiarized very badly.

Once you go past justice, then you have to go into the rule of personality.

If you've read Hayak's Road-to-serfdom, you'll have an idea of what I'm describing: it's the loss of the rule of law (where the law sets down specific procedures for use in all cases) to the rule of personality (where the law empowers individuals to be as subjective as they want).

That said, there is one other thing you can do. You can inform the student -- in writing -- that you consider his work to be plagiarized, naming the work and the source. Further, you can inform him in writing that if he is in the future to ask you for a recommendation, it will be a bad one, and will include a copy of this assignment, with specifics. That, also, is straight justice, and is not without effect.

That said, plagiarism is nowadays standard in physics. So is bullying that silences academic freedom (Take, for instance, JPLs bullying to prevent the publication of the fact that its Titan lander photos -- which contain smoke plumes, amazingly enough -- actually are left-right reversed photos of Pearl Harbor, taken from a Japanese plane.). So is the misawarding of degrees (such as PhDs, awarded on a first-come first-serve basis, rather than to the person who did all the work). So is the misawarding of awards (such as the Nobel Prize... for example, the story of the discovery of superconductivity).

Quite frankly, I don't have a lot of respect for academia in general. But insofar as a particular school or professor tries to do the best they can, I have respect for *them*.