Student Fights University Over Plagiarism-Detector 949
(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."
their crawler (Score:5, Interesting)
Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:5, Interesting)
One day he had to bring someone into his room to tell them that in future, it wasn't advisable to plagiarise from his own book and hand it right back into him, because he could recognise his own style!
With essays that can be purchased over the internet, why shouldn't McGill safeguard against having crap, plagiarized work handed into them? The students who do this are trying to decieve the university. The article seemed to be saying that the professors were trying to just get out of doing work, and it wasn't to catch cheaters. I don't see why it is wrong to know within a reasonable margin of error that the work you are marking is not plagiarized.
Anti-cheating detectors are good (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing New (Score:4, Interesting)
No-one threw their rattle out of their pram then.
I mean, how is this different from someone doing it manually?
Reply (Score:3, Interesting)
er... how about science: "Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study" or "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena"??? Or are you just small minded?
The website says "Originality Reports are exact duplicates of submitted papers, except that any text either copied or paraphrased appears underlined, color-coded, and linked to its original source." [they check against the internet, academic papers and past submitted reports].
When a subject is quite tightly defined, there must be a limit of permutations/combinations in text. I don't like the idea of this system, but would like to know where they draw the line regarding paraphrasing - is a sentence, paragraph, larger? Is it only exact paraphrasing that is detected or can adjectives be sprinkled about?
Technically interesting, but the false-positive risk is worrying.
Re:Damn stright! (Score:1, Interesting)
What's the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Interesting)
As a former university teacher, I've never used this turnitin site, but I did use a 30-line python script that would take random fragments of 10 consecutive words in the papers and would run them (a) through google and (b) against all other papers that were turned in. This worked awesomely well and saved me a lot of time that I could spend on actually assessing the quality of the non-fraudulent papers.
Plagiarism simply happens and I don't see the problem with automated checking for it. Automating tasks that formerly needed insight, training, and knowledge might be called the information revolution.
Hm. (Score:3, Interesting)
And in what sense is the site making money off this fellow's work? Are they selling it to other students to plagiarize? I'm guessing that what they're doing is making sure nobody else plagiarizes *his* work.
I don't want to belittle this fellow's feelings, but this really sounds like a case of angry testosterone syndrome - he's identified something, decided that it's an insult, and decided to fight it no matter what. Been there, done that. Hell, I did it yesterday when someone backed a change I made out of CVS. Getting pissed off didn't help. I'd feel more sympathy if, e.g., he'd submitted his paper and been falsely accused of plagiarizing.
It will be interesting to see what happens if this system sees wide use. At some point, at the level of undergraduate papers, it seems like it will inevitably start reporting false positives simply because there isn't really that much to say about any given topic, so once you have a couple of hundred papers on that topic, there's always going to be one paper that's enough like another that it will show up as plagiarism even though it's not.
Re:As a professor.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't about plagarization. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the accessability of information increases every day - the people who benefit from it are those that stay ahead of the curve. Those that benefit from the status quo fall behind.
The system where you are ranked on your ability to function within an autonomous vacuum is probably going to fall apart, because people in the real world no longer enforce that vacuum. Today's kids synthesize from multiple branches of media in everything they do, and sharing data, information, or anything else digital is second nature.
Judging someone on how well they write a paper is silly, in a world where the paper is already available, and readily accessable. Find something worthwhile to judge them on, and do the hard work necessary to judge them accurately on it, because they won't do it for you. You're laziness will only make more loopholes for them to control you through.
Secondly, todays educational institutions (most of them anyway) are cheap shams of what they once were. Going to university used to mean a period of hardship and disconnection from your old life where you were shaped into a person who cherished academics, tradition, service, honor and culture.
Now, it's the place you go to party for 4 years so you can put something "totally rad" on your resume. These institutions are letting the students down, and in turn, the students are letting the institutions down, and the whole mess is sinking into the sewer.
Re:As a professor.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.
Re:There is an important upside to the system (Score:5, Interesting)
Students are subject to peer pressure. Everyone is subject to it. But if your classmate cheats, that doesn't mean that you will too. Granted, where one's view differs on this is dependant on one's belief/trust/faith in other humans.
I have nothing against the service itself. I have nothing against schools using it as a screening method to flag potentially problematic papers.
I have a problem with the institution making the students be the ones to submit their works to have it validated.
What does that teach a student? That they are not trusted. That their teachers have no faith in their character.
While this might catch a few cheaters, it stands a high chance of souring good students to do good work.
If a good student gets flagged, is that added to their record as a "risk factor"? How will that impact their academic and professional career?
Will there come a point where the service is trusted outright and positives aren't checked and students are penalized and/or expelled by default?
I agree, there is no easy solution which doesn't have a cost. Stuffing 100 students into a classroom is just wrong from a teaching standpoint. But so is subjecting students to a "academic cavity search".
I attended a state university and so know what you mean about 100 student classrooms. I currently attend a private university and pay quite a bit more. But there are only 15-20 students in the class and the learning quality is much much higher.
We depend so much on "services" that the higher ups think that "bodies" and "resources" like schools, classrooms, teachers, and books are expendable. That is WRONG.
I'm sorry to hear that you are burdened with so many students. However, burdening students' conscience with these screening services is the quick fix which will lead to a death spiral of educational quality.
It makes me sick to know that my children will have to go through this.
Turnitin@home (Score:5, Interesting)
It's frightfully easy to write your own plagiarism detector. All you have to do is write a script to scan the paper and run a few samples of 10 consecutive words in the paper as a search term through google. If for two different queries you get the same site in the google result list, it's a practical certainty that you've found a copy at that site. Chances of someone coming up with the same wording of some subject in two disjoint fragments of 10 words are abysimally small.
Given that most plagiarism happens by copying from the internet (and students usually use google to actually find such documents), you yourself can use google in the same way.
I once wrote a 20-line python script to do just this, and it worked very well. It even found some plagiarism inside a an (awarded) document that was plagiarised.
Re:There is an important upside to the system (Score:4, Interesting)
And I am a student. And you guys wouldn't believe the crap people try to force down our throaths. Persoanlly, among the worst atrocities college forced upon me is an essay about... *drumroll* THE EFFICIENT DISPOSAL OF ICT WASTE! *ba-dum CHING!* How's that for a class where 50% wants to become a developer, 25% network administrator and the other 25% always skips class? IF I had done that essay as expected it would have cost me quite a bit of time and every second I spent writing that essay would be one second too much, which pretty much everyone though. The end result? 12 nearly identical essays, while 12 others never were handed in. No one was interested, no one gave a damn and no one wrote one original bit.
Of course it's easy to blame student of being lazy. Tell you what, you make college worth my time AND money, I'll do your goddamn assignments.
Re:Standard operating procedure (Score:2, Interesting)
If students are regularly cheating on exams, it's a good sign that these students are a. not concerned about actually getting value for their dollar, b. too lazy to learn the material, c. morally corrupt and lacking integrity, d. shouldn't be in college to begin with.
If you can't do your own work, why are you in college to begin with? The who point is to get a 'higher education', not copy off your neighbor and wallow in dishonest behavior.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's separate two issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, can you make it a condition of a course that work submitted will be licensed to such a service? Debatable. Copyright normally vests in the student. However, it is often the case that universities require that students grant them a royalty free non exclusive license to use the work for essentially internal purposes. See, e.g., McMaster.ca [mcmaster.ca].
In principle, an appropriately drafted policy, adopted by the university, and made known to students before enrolment, would allow such use. However, I suspect that in this case the policy was never formally adopted by the university (especially given the trial use of the software) and as such amounted to an attempt by the university to unilaterally vary their contract with the student.
On a personal note, just yesterday I failed a student for lifting the bulk of an assignment straight from the web, while not too long ago I had the dubious pleasure of failing another student who paid me the tribute of taking four pages directly from my own text.
Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good (Score:2, Interesting)
copyright issue: the company keeps the essays (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [globeandmail.com] website for more discussion, including of students' thoughts.
Re:Honor Code (Score:3, Interesting)
IIRC, my university's policy was to put a blotch on your academic transcripts (goodbye graduate school), and if you're caught again, you're expelled for academic dishonesty. Most Canadian universities have similar policies, so I don't doubt McGill is the same.
From a blurb they have on the policy http://www.mcgill.ca/integrity/strategies/student/ [mcgill.ca], it seems they also have a problem my university had... professors who like to keep the incident behind closed doors.
I recall once there was an outrageous attempt by a group of people I was living with to plagarise. Six people, living on the same floor in the same residence all took the same paper, and handed it in. Stunning really. Only one of them took the time to reword it, but the others just handed it in. The situation was so completely over the top, that although it was reported to the dean, the dean decided not to put it on their transcripts... they were all forced to repeat the assignment to keep it off their records, the professor's full late penalties applied (mark was cut in half). They got off very light in my opinion, but the professor was widely perceived to be a bit of a joke, and oddly enough, knowing them better than the dean or the professor, I can honestly say that they normally weren't plagarists... I think the group-mentality just set in and they all did something very stupid.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Interesting)
If there's any interest in this, it would be fairly easy to set it up to use the Google API and make it a small sourceforge project. It seems that if users of the script obtain a valid API key such a script does not violate Google's TOS for the API.
The one that checks for occurances in other papers is so easy (using a python dictionary) that I leave that as an excercise for the reader :-)
two things (Score:3, Interesting)
My own worry about turnitin.com is that they allow students to access the service as a "deterrent", so that students can see whether their essays infringe. Since students should already know whether their essays are plagiarized, the only point here is to submit essays to see whether one will get caught.
Fortunately, most plagiarists are stupid. (I keep a mental list of anecdotes of dumb plagiarists, like the one who turned in an essay by Karl Marx--not just any essay by Marx, but one that was assigned for class reading--or the one who got caught because the essay included words like "My mother always said, 'Frank
Web Usage Stats (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Source Scan (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Damn stright! (Score:2, Interesting)
That's according to a certain Associate Professor who checks papers for plagiarism all the time. Specifically, my mother.
Re:The problem isn't about plagarization. (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of your points about the disregard for teaching at large universities have some validity. I would urge that you reconsider your use of the term "marginalized." Many people go into this business because they love teaching, love helping others discover truth, and love working with undergraduates. I teach at a small liberal arts college with a stellar reputation (in the region especially, but also in the whole country). I guarantee that if you are looking for a great, traditional education like you described you can find it at one of these "marginalized" places.
Don't get me wrong; money is still a huge issue here. Tuition is climbing and there is more and more emphasis on fund raising and pleasing rich alumni, etc. But I can honestly say that teaching is still our first priority. We have small classes taught by professors that you can meet with for any reason (class related or personal), and we send students to the best graduate schools in the country.
I am not in exile because I don't want to be a research super-star. I'm here because I want to be in a place that values my priorities and skills in teaching.
PS: I am also an active member of the professional academy. One difference: I try to get my students involved in my work and even take them to conferences to check things out.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the school is giving the students a break. Let them submit their own essays for validation. If they fail validation, the student can rework his essay and do it again until the essay manages to pass validation. This way, you don't have a situation where the school subjects a student to discipline for plagarism - allowing a student to learn a lesson without being punished with reduced grades, etc.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:3, Interesting)
the first is the press release sheet of the original site, Turnitin (turn-it-in)
one is a project proposal by an IT company that offers to install Turnitin at schools in australia. It appears they use the press release to describe the product
three are schools that have implemented Turnitin, and have "appropriated" a paragraph of the press release to link back to Turnitin's main site
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Interesting)
It goes something like this:
"I will know if you cheat. I will catch you. I may miss it the first time, I may miss it the second time, but I will catch you. If you turn in one paper, and then in your second paper, the setence structure and word usage are completely different, I will know something is up. I keep all copies of all of your in class and out of class writing assignments, so it's easy to compare. I've been teaching here for X years, and I was once a student too, don't think I don't know all of the tricks."
Professors aren't idiots (and they have also been able to throw words and phrases into search engines for just as long as students have been able to find papers the same way.)
Even if you have one professor that doesn't catch you, the next one probably will.
Compare to Stanford's Policies (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a little blurb on stanford's and U of V's policies policies (Taken from here [millersv.edu], speaking of plagiarizing :P )
[Stanford] gives students and the community full responsibility of themselves and of upholding the honor law. The university puts all the pressure of academic integrity on its students and it trusts them enough not to cheat so that the faculty is not constantly reminding them of the Code, "The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent [...] dishonesty [...]. The faculty will also avoid, as far as practicable, academic procedures that create temptations to violate the Honor Code." (S. U.) Another school where this idea of ienforcementi is put into effect is the University of Richmond in Virginia. This school lets students "leave the classroom during an exam or [...] may even take the exam home" (U. of V.). The professors trust the students because of the enforcement factor. Instead of faculty breathing down the student's neck about cheating, the student knows it is his/her responsibility not to cheat. Millersville University would benefit by adopting this honor code. The students here are trustworthy and would also benefit from the fact that they are trusted by their instructors.
There are other ways to catch plagiarism (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a valid point, no professor will be familiar with all the works out there, and hence will be unable to look at a student work and state that he's seen it before. However, this is not the only way to catch plagiarism.
One flaw in plagiarism is that each person has an individual writing style. Therefore, as long as a class requires multiple essays over the course of the semester, a professor should be able to spot plagiarism, as they should be able to look at the second paper of the semester by John Doe and see that it looks as if a different person wrote it than wrote the first paper. (Of course, this supposes that the professor is only required to teach a reasonable number of students each semester, few enough that he can be familiar with them and their writing style.) I can guarantee you that if I tried to pass off one of your essays as one of mine to a professor who I've had before, they'd spot that the plagiarized essay has a different feel, different words that the author has an affinity for, etc.
Another argument that people might raise against this method is that students may plagiarize all the essays in the course, hence the professor would not be familiar with their personal writing style, but the writing style of their plagiarized source. However, in order for the student to get away with this, the student would need the writing style of all his plagiarized essays to be the same. This would be very difficult to do, unless the essay topics are very generic. If the esay topics are somewhat specific, than it would be difficult to find one author/source that can appropriately answer all the essays. Additionally, if this is a major concern, I would just require ONE of the essays to be in class. That essay would provide a standard for determining each student's writing style.
Additionally, people might point out that in today's litigious world, a professor might be able to spot plagiarism using this method, but not to prove it. However, once a professor spots an essay using this method, then he can begin searching for the source using Google, etc.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why did this get modded up?
It is a matter of being treated like a criminal first.
First of all, plagarism isn't a criminal offence, or really anything like one. It's an acedemic offence. I don't know how you could possibly come to be so outraged. Second, if you RTFA, you'll see that McGill is using "TurnitIn.com" on a limited trial basis.
Additionally, some people have raised the point that it is somehow wrong that a company get access to these students works. I don't know how it works at most schools, but I'm a Canadian university student (from Ontario, that big province next to Quebec - where McGill is) and at my school, it is expressly stated in many places that all work submitted for classes is the sole property of the University. If they want to sell it, hey, its their right. Not that there have in the past been many cases where there was much commercial value to an undergrads course work.
Which brings me to my next point: This kid is being a whiny little snot. Did you see his picture? He looks like a scruffy little Che wannabe. He should be happy that there is even a tiny commercial demand for his work, such as it is. (Note: He got B's and C's on the papers mentioned. Yes, the schoold did in fact agree to re-evaluate his papers after originally giving him zeroes.) And look who he's backed up by: The Canadian Federation of Students. I'm not sure if its the same everywhere, but Student Fedrations in Canada are notoriously leftist, overreacting, and nearly if not completely dysfunctional organizations. Look at their quote:
From the article: "The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.
"...Really isn't about catching cheaters"!!?? For their TRIAL use of the program which they PAY FOR!? Does anyone actually believe that this is some kind of conspiracy to a) make money, or b) somehow trample on the poor little student? Are they accusing the system of marking students papers without looking at them? This is simply a huge overreaction, although very characteristic and not at all surprising
This whole thing nothing but a case of trying to stop what is actually a very large and very real problem in acedemia, particularly at the undergrad level. I for one am thankful that they are taking serious steps to address the issue, instead of ignoring it.
Removing your site from Turnitin.com's database? (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone here had any experience with getting Turnitin.com to remove your site from their database - and prove that they have done so? We just noticed that their bot appears to have done a complete crawl and sucked in our entire site. This violates our terms of service (not to mention copyright) since Turnitin.com is a commercial entity.
If Turnitin wants to pay to use our content that's one thing, but just taking it for their own commerical exploitation without any compensation is completely another.
Re: Hrmm (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in law school. Plagarism there is quite serious, although I seem to recall a prior /. discussion that Senator Biden apparently plagarized a report and seems none the worse for it.
Those professors of mine that have discussed it have this to say (about plagerism from court decisions, at least): It used to be hard to detect plagarism, but now it is easy. They say they can tell when a student has plagerized, as the writing is just too polished, so they go online and type in some text and often can find the match.
I just don't know why anyone would even attempt to copy in this way as you can always cite to something, and thus make it's use proper. Alternatively, just talk to the professor or get the zero - the alternative is risk of expulsion. I believe schools can even recind degrees they've awarded if evidence of wrongdoing comes up.
At First Blush (Score:3, Interesting)
Last time I looked, the college itself is making money off other people's work in general, and your only compensation is a diploma (assuming you finish).
I'm unaware of any prohibition of the schools making a students work public, though they may have to take pains to make sure the author's name is removed. So if they put this work on the web, aren't search engines making a profit off this work? That is a battle that has already been fought and lost.
All of that is an aside. The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever works you produce. When I was in college, I constantly heard grumbles (far more justified) about professors assigning graduate students programming tasks that the professors would collect and string into marketable products. At the University of Illinois professors are allowed to profit from side projects, though this is not true for all universities.
As for fear of false positives, that would be a legitimate complaint if the plaggerism detector merely turned back a yeah/nay response. The article says it returns a fitness number of originality. I would assume when the number gets too low, you the teacher can request the most offending example that it was supposedly plagereized from. Now it becomes a human decision again, by comparing the two papers. I would also imagine this side by side check would only be done on students whose papers consistently come back with low fitness numbers. Assuming this is the way it is applied, I don't have much of a problem with it. The alternative is to just realize that good plagerizers will get the same grades on essays as everyone else, now that so much searchable material is available on the web.
The problem and the solution (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that the assignments handed out are overly broad. Instead, I believe the solution is to significantly narrow down the problem, so that it is more or less unique. You may find it on the net, but u'll spend more time getting it to conform to the requirements.
For e.g., instead of asking for the effects of globalization on world economy (or some such thing), ask them for effects of globalization on THEIR life. u get the idea...
Where's the license? (Score:4, Interesting)
As I can see it, I return my paper to the prof and because I have the copyright to the paper, it cannot be stored by some for-profit-company unless I license it. Perhaps I should hand out my paper to the prof with a written license that he can use it as required for grading it but the paper may not be redistributed. If this web service doesn't allow comparing the paper without adding the content to their database, then the prof cannot use this service. If, on the other hand, the service allows checking papers without adding the content to the database, I can see absolutely no reason why the prof shouldn't be allowed to use the service if he feels that it's the most effective way to work. If the professor or the university pays the bill, of course.
Re:Class, repeat after me...offshoring (Score:3, Interesting)
People pay tuition because high-quality employers (and graduate schools) prefer candidates who come from prestigious four-year universities. A degree (and high GPA) from such a university indicates:
(1) The student excelled at the coursework. This is the bare minimum, and can be provided by any university; however, most employers prefer the guarantee of rigor and a reasonable breadth and depth that is provided by a prestigious school.
(2) The student was mature enough to do well at the coursework while at the same time living away from home for the first time (in most cases). Again, this can be provided by most four-year schools, but the more prestigious the school, the more of an accomplishment this is presumed to be (with good reason--the culture at, say, MIT, requires a much faster maturation than, say, the local community college; whether that's a good thing is another question, but adaptability is certainly a virtue prized by employers and grad schools).
(3) The student was exposed to and had (the opportunity for) contact with some of the finest minds on the planet, and presumably to their research. This is especially important for graduate school. This is not accomplished primarily in the classroom, but through one-on-one conversations in office hours, small discussion sections or reading groups, and undergraduate research.
As to your second question, India already has hundreds of campuses with extremely competitive admissions standards; a reason that skilled, educated workers are available in India is that a large number of Indians are highly educated, most in India, not the U.S.
I go to McGill... (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, the use of Turnitin.com is very rare at McG. In fact, the prof for this class is one of only two profs in the whole school that make using the site mandatory. Apparently this prof is the only one that thinks we're all rabid cheaters.
Secondly, although the article dosen't say it, the case was won in a domestic McGill instiution. As of the fall (when this was big news), the saga of Jesse Rosenfeld had moved beyond the negociations with the prof, to the point where he was about to file a J(udicial)-Board complaint. Seeing as the J-Board, however, takes somewhere in the matter of a year to get anything done, it was time for another round of negociations, this time between Jesse, the prof, the departement, and Student Advocacy which got the solution.
Oh yeah, and this was after five or six articles in both Campus papers, as well as the backing of the Undergrad Student Society and the Postgrad Student Society.
So way to go Jesse. Although I'm personally not a fan of you, you won one for the little guy.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Simply trusting the students is not a reasonable option. Schools have a reputation to uphold in the eyes of employers. If they start turning out graduates who claim to have taken a writing class but couldn't write a complete sentence to save their lives, employers will think twice before hiring their students in the future. That means students will not want to go there in the future, meaning fewer students and poorer quality students, leading to a never-ending spiral until eventually the university closes. I've seen universities go down that path, and it isn't pretty.
Those companies don't make money off your paper. They don't make a single penny more because your paper is on their servers. They make money because they provide an important service.
That having been said, doing this on final submission is the wrong way to solve the problem. The right way is to give the students the opportunity to revise the paper after such a submission and resubmit as often as desired. That way, they know they've been caught and can redeem themselves by doing the work themselves.
It also could provide a means for near real-time grammar and spelling advice, which is much a much better way to actually learn than simply getting back papers with red marks. If the purpose of teaching is to teach (rather than to simply deflate students' sense of self-worth as some teachers seem to believe :-| ), then this has a lot of potential....
Just my $0.02.
Re:Copyright? (Score:4, Interesting)
This post is Copyright 2004 by Anthony DiPierro. Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited.
What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text
Absolutely nothing. However, just because you write something doesn't mean it's true. Can I sue slashdot for distributing this post?
If it works for Major League Baseball, why can't it work for a student?
Major League Baseball has lost a lot of its copyright fights. Specifically the whole "no description or account of this game" has been thrown out by courts. Doesn't stop them from saying it. But saying it doesn't make it true.
Re:Hrmm (Score:2, Interesting)
No offense, but I could care less if students cheat. In the end they are only cheating themselves. The problem comes when these students enter the workforce and all the employers care about is their GPA and spend no time actually interviewing their potential candidates. A thorough interview and a good judge of character will weed out the slackers.
Kudos to the one employer I've had who truly had the ability to put together a great team. It was a sad day to see him leave.
Re:There is an important upside to the system (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly - I gave an assignment to 90 students last year. 5 were original. I returned all the others with the original URL attached.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a University professor with a goodly collection of published academic papers, I assure you that publishing in the academic world does not work like submitting to this "anti-cheating" service.
The typical agreement between an academic and a publisher gives an exclusive right to publish the copyrighted work to the publisher. These days, that exclusive right is often time-limited and/or limited to allow the author to self publish online. In any case, the publisher is almost never given the copyright itself, or given permission to go do arbitrary things with the work other than publish it in specified ways.
Note also that the author is giving the academic publisher the exclusive right to use the work in return for a benefit: the publication of the work. The "anti-cheating" service provides no such benefit to the student: they are being asked to give up their rights in return for the possibility of being falsely accused of plagiarism. Hardly a reasonable bargain. In fact, again IANAL but I think an excellent case could be made under contract law that there is no binding contract, due to no consideration to each side.
I would refuse to publish in a forum with a copyright agreement like that of this "anti-cheating" service; I share the concerns of the students in this area.
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Bam, second essay I turn in that I had written previously, I get called in. Turns out, my teacher thought that I had been plagarizing. He ran my papers through one of these databases, that my high school teacher had so conveniently submitted my papers to, and got a hit.
There was nothing I could do to convince my teacher I wasn't plagarizing. I was able to word for word recite passages and ideas out of my paper, from memory. Apparently that wasn't good enough. I almost lost two years of college education (plagarism annuls all the courses you have taken at this university) because of a stupid service like this one. Screw them. They aged me five years over worrying about whether re-submitting my own original work was going to ruin my future.
In other words, this is not full-proof and I pity the students who turn the same paper into more than one class, because you may just get screwed.
Re:As a professor.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that they can change their license at any time.
If their license stipulated that (a) upon dissolution of the company, all paper rights will be forfeited, (b) the paper rights may not be sold, (c) the paper rights are for exclusive use in detecting cheating, and (d) the license is nonexclusive (perhaps there's a generic email address that reports can be sent to to be entered into *all* the anticheating services, so that they recieve no business benefit in owning the paper as property -- only the academic communit as a whole really does -- then I'd be interested in seeing if folks still object).
I don't think that there are many legitimate concerns that the anticheating company could raise. The professor doen't have to do significantly more work. At least some of the students' concerns are addressed.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:2, Interesting)
That, and the fact that the fact that the English language only ~12 bits of entropy per word(1), it's very likely a birthday attack will be pulled against this database.
(1) http://www.stanford.edu/~vjsriniv/project/entropy_ of_english_9.htm [stanford.edu]
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:3, Interesting)
The (very, very sad) reality is that there is a disguesting amount of cheating that is happening in Computer Science programs. It is a genuine concern of professors to have to worry about this. The fact there there is enough demand to warrant a company to check on it should tell you something.
The year before I became a TA for an operating systems course, my school had to give up on NACHOS (Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System) as part of the cirriculum. There were too many full source implementations sitting on the net that were getting turned in as homework assignments. I ended up changing the program to use Linux with assinments revolving around kernel hacking. The sad thing is that I think the students learned less than if they had used NACHOS since NACHOS allowed them to experience all facets of the operating system from the ground up versus the Linux assignments that had to be a lot more focused. (The lessons I learned from having done NACHOS in '94 I still use today.)
The assertion that cheat checkers don't work well with homework assignments is true for small enough units of code, the kind found in introductory courses. Even then, you'd be surprised at how different 30 people can write the same simple program. Cheat checkers used in those classes generate several false positives per assignment that usually get human review. One match between another student is usually tagged as a "whatever", the second gets noticed... three or four in a row of the same two or three students and you have a real problem. Legit submissions that hit false positives usually match different students on the second and third try. By the time assignments get into second year CS programs, assignments are several hundred lines long and usually are sufficiently different to not get matched at all from different implementations. Third year assignments and any matches are immediately suspicious.
In general, professors use cheat checkers as a tool to identify trends. Final decisions are made by the professors themselves -- they're CS grads, they know that cheat checkers aren't perfect. A few hits and you usually get a meeting with a prof with a few questions. If you know the material and can explain the code, you're fine. You'd be amazed at the number of people that get into that situation and can't explain the code one bit.
In the end, the real losers in this are the students that don't cheat. Not having mastered the art of deception and taking others people work and claiming it their own, those who have been honest end up not making as much money or getting as far with their careers. Those that have mastered deception are the ones that become your Pointed Haired Bosses and lie to you. Funny how that works...
Aren't you so high, mighty, and noble. (Score:3, Interesting)
In my many years of experience in education, I have come across miserable people. Some of those miserable people were/are in a position of incredible power over the future of their students. To stick it to these people, in however small a way, is immensely satisfying - especially if you do it with their own asinine rules.
You will see a similar situation in prisons where inmates will use whatever techniques are at their disposal to make life difficult for their keepers.
Suffice it to say there probably was a reason for all the extra effort put into this "electronic copy". There are miserable people everywhere in this world, on both sides of the fence.
Re:Copyright infringement (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess that, by "companies", you mean "three former grad students running a cash-only business from a small apartment just off campus. You're right, the illegal and immoral persecution of these upstanding entrepreneurs is decimating our economy. Sorry, but what plagarists do is not a noble expression of capitalistic innovation; it's an attempt at subverting the educational process by helping others receiving credit for work they did not do.
I have no idea how anything I said could be construed as support for Microsoft's antitrust violations. Perhaps you're simply... what's the word... trolling? Perish the thought.