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."
SCO (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SCO (Score:5, Funny)
their crawler (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Damn stright! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Damn stright! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Damn stright! (Score:5, Insightful)
besides.. if you're plagiarising.. why wouldn't you go through the small extra effort of restructuring the sentences and paragraphs? making the essay essentially 'your own' in style(it would be extremely hard after that to decide with a machine if it was plagiarised or not). getting the information(and guessing what the prof wants there to be in the text) in the first place is the biggest bitch anyways and not the actual writing.
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? Th
Re:At First Blush (Score:4, Informative)
It's called copyright law.
The college takes on the roll of an employer here, and has full rights to whatever you produce.
Unless you have a stipend or work/study arrangement you are a customer of the university, not an employee.
Re:Damn stright! (Score:3, Funny)
Some things it seems pointful to note (Score:4, Informative)
2. The article does note that, in addition to being used at 29 schools in Canada, it's used in 'several' schools in the U.S. Anyone know of any?
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.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the intent is to protect against cheaters, then the teachers should submit the papers to the service for verification. The student should not have to be the one who is being required to turn in their papers to a service.
It is a matter of being treated like a criminal first.
The other problem would be false positives when people write with similar styles in two different parts of the nation/world. Given enough "samples" in their filter, the accuracey drops because you now have a much higher likelihood of turning up a match.
I Agree that plagiarizing work is wrong. But I do not agree that everyone should be treated like a cheater just because some in the student body are.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:5, Informative)
Have you actually any idea what the probabilities are of someone writing the exact same sentence for describing the same thing? Just take this particular post apart and feed ten consecutive words through [google.com] google and see how many hits you get.
Also, take a fairly generic sentence such as "to improve writing and research skills, encourage collaborative online learning" [google.com] and try to find out where I got it from.
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:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:5, Funny)
While we're at it I think it is an invasion of my rights to be treated like a criminal by having to pass through a metal detector in order to enter a federal court house. Also we need to do away with police laser/radar guns because the police have already decided to treat me as a criminal by checking my speed. Oh and background checks for handguns, wtf? I'm no criminal I should be allowed to by a gun no questions asked and no waiting period. Anti-theft devices in stores, same thing. Security cameras, ditto. Also I particularly dont care for my neighbors having locks on their doors, they trying to say I'm a thief and am going to steal their stuff as soon as their backs are turned?
We can no longer endure these indignancies. Don't they know we should all be treated as infallible saints until we can be proven otherwise.
Oh and the whole being arrested and then having to defned yourself in court is a sham to. They should have to prove my guilt before even being allowed to arrest me. How dare they!
Funny? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent post is currently modded "funny". I can't tell if it was intended to be funny, but regardless there is an underlying serious issue: that of on whom the burden of proof lies in questions of guilt or innocence. Both Congress and the Bush administration are systematically orchestrating numerous radical reductions to the legal protections formerly held by citizens. These protections should be given much more care and public debate than they're getting. I sincerely hope that the debate doesn't simply amount to chuckles at strawman positions.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:3, Insightful)
But you are right, once everybody starts submitting silly reports to services, the system will flood and EVERYBODY WILL BE PLAGIRIZING! A good student response wou
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:5, Informative)
I live in Montreal and attend Concordia, so I've heard quite a bit about this case. There were two main principles at issue here:
1 - The fact that students were presumed guilty until proven innocent (ie: ALL students were treated as plagiarists and had to prove otherwise or get zero).
and (and this is a biggie)
2 - Copies of the student's work submitted to the service were kept and included into its database...students had no say in the future use of their work, they either had to give up rights to it in favor of the service (so they could add it to their database and use it to make money) or refuse, not use the service and get zero.
As near as I can tell the student, nor any of the people supporting him, had no problem with using the service as a tool...only to the conditions of using it and the fact that it was used before any suspicion of plagiarism existed.
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well how can they safeguard against this? (Score:3, Insightful)
When students cheat and dodge assignments, they diminish the intelectual level of graduates my University produces. They also di
Anti-cheating detectors are good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good (Score:5, Informative)
Since when did plagiarising become learning? Learning is taking existing material and working on it to produce new thought, ideas and interpretations.
Sure, you can have long explicit quotes but you must mark them as such. If the anti-cheating detectors flags you for such a paragraph, there's no problem if I can see that you've actually contributed to the report. If there's a real problem with the material, I will still give you a chance to explain yourself to me. I don't see what's the problem here. There are plenty of safeguards in place - no-one gets rejected because "an algorithm said the work is a copy".
We have a problem with otherwise underachiving students turning in word-for-word copies of old high-grade reports. The clever ones will try to modify the wording slightly, change the layout or the figures to confuse the examiners. Bayesian filters will still flag those.
Re:Anti-cheating detectors are good (Score:3, Insightful)
Also for masters and PhD programs you have to routinely defend your work as a matter of course.
Sure if the student has a disability they should have some other course [say, appeal in writing, have a spec.ed councellor, etc...]
Tom
As a professor.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, that little quip about financial compensation is completely off-base. Students pay to learn, and once the prof has decided that they'll have a better learning experience if they submit to the site (presumably because they will feel forced to think for themselves instead of copying from term paper mills) they have no "right" to compensation. The practice is offensive, but from an educational standpoint, it is little different than the professor using their papers in class as examples for others. Either way, other people benefit from the student's work without compensation for the student. That's the way education works. The fact that antiplagiarism sites make money from their line of business (and the examples submitted by the students) is of no import, as long as they aren't selling the essays as part of an anthology or something. It's a feedback loop within the educational process and even though I disapprove of the practice, nobody's "rights" are violated.
Re:As a professor.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Students hold copyrights to their work (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot speak for every or even most academic institutions firsthand. That said, I think this statement is completely false for virtually all universities here in the
Re:As a professor.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why on earth is this modded up?
NO COLLEGE DOES THIS!
(Look at the other replies.) Even if it did, I doubt it would hold up in court. It would be like the electric
Re:As a professor.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. But it's certainly better than jsut letting students develop the idea that "researching a subject" means "doing a google search". (And in Brazil, where I teach, the words "research", that we use in assignments and "search", for google are the same, "pesquisa").
But anyway... Students also need to learn not to take offense. Hey, ti's the rules. Are they offended becau
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?
Re:Nothing New (Score:3, Informative)
That's kind of unfair considering with most first-year assignments if they DIDN'T look similar then the student probably did the assignment wrong. At least most of our first year programming assignments were very simple things and we were expected to use
There is an important upside to the system (Score:5, Insightful)
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).
Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive.
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.
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.
Hmmm - do they have an alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it seems the examiner has the right, even the duty to examine the papers which have been submitted. Checking for plagiarism seems fair, and also that he is using technical aids for doing so.
The article also mentions:
"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.
It seems that all the system does is check for plagiarism. Assuming it does that in a sensible manner (not providing false positives without pointing to the reference material) then it's just relieving the examiners from boring repetetive work.
A seperate issue is if they don't just have to have the paper checked, but also integrated into the database. I tend to think papers submitted to the university examiners should be public domain, though.
If Only......... (Score:5, Funny)
Why should the student bear the burden? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the teacher is truly concerned about cheating and plaigerism, then the teacher/official should be the one paying the service and submitting the works to the 3rd party business, not the student.
The student's obligation is to do the work of the assignment and turn it in. Grading and detection of falsehoods/duplicity/cheating/etc are the responsibilities of the teachers, not the students.
What's next? Submit your work to a business which does the grading?
My site gets hit by turnitin and at first, I was amused. But if a teacher is forcing a student to go through this process, then that teacher is basically saying that their students are not trustworthy and is an assumption of guilt by default.
Shame on the teacher for requiring that of their student and attempting to fail the student. Shame on the school for letting it happen.
_His_ Original Work? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least that's the reality I've encountered so far from all the places I've been to
The fairest policy I've seen (and that is by no means fair IMO) was to declare all work joint IP of the student-College, but the College handles it and decides what to do. The student only has "advisory" rights and gets a share of any of the possible profits arising from the IP.
This means that "His Original Work" is a euphemism and if he doesn't like it, well he should have checked what he was signing when he enrolled. I certainly did.
Re:_His_ Original Work? (Score:3, Informative)
Please specify what institutions you're talking about, in what country, and at least one piece of evidence that this is an official policy -- because I don't believe it.
I teach in Massachusetts and talk to many teachers at a number of insti
Standard operating procedure (Score:3, Insightful)
If students regularly cheat in written exams, it's a good sign that the exams are pointless. The proper response is to ask "why are students so unmotivated that they don't bother to make an original contribution", not "how can we catch and punish the bastards one more time."
Sadly it's always simpler to turn complex questions into easy "wrong and right" issues.
It's obvious from the Internet that the majority of people can be, in the right circumstances, incredibly creative and original. The challenge is to create these circumstances, not to enforce a dogmatic and broken system of education that students are obviously not interested in.
drug use in sports? (Score:3, Insightful)
People aren't *always* tested for every event they compete in. They might have random tests by the NCAA or college and they might be tested by the college for suspicion but they aren't tested every single time at every single event.
The point in the article about it being laziness and budget issues by the college not wanting to hire enough staff is ridiculous though. Either a single professor grades the papers or a professor and a grad student do it. What are there supposed to be 2 or 3 professors grading papers for each class?
I don't agree with this particular method being chosen to police the papers... I think that professors should have to grade the papers (for spelling, grammar, and for content -- plagerized or not). If the student has shown issues in the past with this topic then perhaps it should be scrutinized more carefully (even by a commitee) but by a web-based program?
Let's get back to what's important in colleges... TEACHING and GRADING. Stop worrying so much about how much free time you have to work on your next book.
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.
Maybe it's better for the student to submit... (Score:3, Insightful)
Whereas, if the student submits the paper, and it turns out to be plagiarized, the student has an opportunity to rewrite it without any negative sanctions. If you _are_ a cheater, this sounds like a better deal. If you're _not_, I can see where it would be more than a little bit offensive.
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:The problem isn't about plagarization. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm currently enrolled in second year undergraduate studies at a major Canadian University.. I'm taking a BEng in Computer Engineering. And let me tell you, it IS a period of hardship and disconnection from my old l
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:Turnitin@home (Score:4, Insightful)
You actually need snapshots from before the paper existed to do anything meaningful.
The second problem is that lots of little businesses sell people guaranteed *new* papers.
There are things that can be done more constructively to deal with such problems, and at least verify the student knows some of the subject - one of the most obvious being to randomly pick a few students each submission and invite them to a 30 minute defence of their essay.
This is a wide spread problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel the same way everytime I'm forced to reply to an email at work. Why should Mircosoft make money off my original work? Why can't I just enscribe my message onto clay tablets I make myself.
Everyone seems to think they have some right to profit these days. The nerve.
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.
Wish my professors used this (Score:4, Insightful)
Here am I working my ass off because I believe in doing my own work so I can learn while everyone else tries to cheat.
How do you monitor the anti-cheating service? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously it will look at the number of students who are reported to have plagiarized. If no students turn up as cheating, then either the company's scan doesn't work, or the University's students are so honest that there is no reason to pay for the service.
In either case, the company reviewing the papers has a pretty strong incentive to adjust their software to generate more positives. "Gee, well, we're just trying to err on the side of caution. It wouldn't be fair to the Good Students to let someone through who might be cheating!"
I'd even wager that the company in question has already projected that a certain number of papers will be rejected each year. What happens if they miss that agreed upon quota?
Sorry, but under these circumstances it seems unreasonable to suggest that some 19 year old student can successfully defend themselves against a large corporation that has already been endorsed by the University.
Copyright infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
They are copying the work, for the sole purpose of destroying it's marketable value. This is very illegal. I hope someone nails them a few times, at the maximum penalty they'll be gone.
Also as a student I should not have to give rights of my work to anyone.
Academic fraud is a problem, but the end doesn't justify the means.
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.
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
Copyright? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had an Engineering teacher once who was too lazy to make up different tests for his courses every year. He got upset that the IEEE student chapter was archiving student's copies of his tests for use in future years (which, since he rarely changed the questions on the tests, was like an answer key), so he required all classwork and tests to bear a copyright notice with his name and the students' name on it. He specifically told the IEEE chapter that they could not copy his class materials. Faced with this, they stopped archiving the tests, even though they probably could have still archived original copies and just not permitted anyone to make any reproductions.
Of course, a student is in a much weaker position to assert his or her rights, since he needs a grade from the teacher more then the teacher needs to grade his paper. But I'm sure there's more than one law student who was anal enough to try this...
Re:Copyright? (Score:5, Informative)
US copyright law specifically does this. However, it is up to the copyright holder to defend the copyright. The law is on the side of the copyright holder, and court costs can be included, I believe. However, finding a lawyer willing to defend your copyright could prove difficult, unless your paper has some sort of value to someoene other than you. Remember, many people write music and novels. Not too many people make a living writing and publishing "unknown" talent, so proving damage would be difficult if not impossible. Most copyright infringement cases deal with the infringement after the copied work makes millions of dollars.
Value of intelectual property, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder!
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.
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)
Automating Control = Downward Spiral (Score:3, Insightful)
*AUTOMATED* technologies used for purposes of control and regulation are inherently wrong. Such automation grossly assumes a kind of ridged non-humaness in how society ought to function. Automated "anti-cheat" devices for schools, automated red light policing cameras, tickets, and racial profiling, as examples, must be stopped now.
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.
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.
Maybe I can sue them? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm wondering if I have legal grounds to sue them, as every paper I have submitted to them has had the following attached to the bottom:
Copyright (C)2003-2004 (My Name). All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized use, reproduction or storage, either electronic or printed, in whole or in part, without written or verbal permission, is a violation of international copyright laws.
Permission for TurnItIn.com and/or iParadigms.com to retain a copy of this work for more than 14 days, or to incorporate this work into their database(s) is explicitly DENIED.
They have terms and conditions people automatically agree to when they use TurnItIn.com, it would seem my terms for them receiving my papers would be valid, as they will obviously ignore them and retain my papers.
It is NOT the same as random drug testing (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is at least two fold:
1) The testing company keeps the submitted essay and then uses it to test further submissions. They are now using the submitted essay for their own profit, and the student is effectively forced to allow this.
The equivalent drug test would be where the blood/urine sample has a value on a secondary market and the original owner loses the right to dictate how this sample is used.
2) Also, there are many procedural issues that relate to plagiarism that make the issue worse. It has been defacto at McGill that if you submit group work and one contributor has plagairised - intentionally or not - then all members of the group are held accountable. Teams often divide work for efficiency. To then require that every team member vet every other member's work is simply impossible in theory and impractical in general.
The equivalent drug test would be to ban everyone on any team that has had any member fail a drug test. For people caught in this net, the heavy-handed practise feels unfair and indefensible.
For people with professional standing (e.g. accountants) this has long reaching impact far beyond some elective where a team member missed citations.
In practise, it can seem like the guilt by association with a death penalty.
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope students are required to hand their papers in to anti-cheat sites, before hand. Hey Id like to make sure people are all getting a fair shake.
later,
epic
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)
While funny, the problem with your argument is that spam gets through filters because the spammers don't seem to care one whit about formatting, presentation or a professional appearance, they just want the damn email in your inbox.
When a college student submits an essay titled:
"The Hist0ry of Pan-Afr]1can Con|flict In Resp0nse to the Amer*ican Slave Trade peterson butterfly tango"
that student has bigger problems then trying to foil an automated plagiarism checker.
Jay (=
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
If professors keep on assigning the same trite, tired topics year after year instead of taking the time to develop new ones, and simply rubber-stamp grades onto half-read papers instead of monitoring each student's progress, they are cheating as much as the students (and yes, I've taught classes with more than 100 students).
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:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
What you did was not plagarism, but it probably was against policy. It surprises me that there was no name attached to the original work. I suppose you could do something like officially copyright your work as you turn it in, so that there's no question that you wrote it.
If your H.S. teacher turned it in without your permission, it may have been a violation of copyright law. You could actually sue to get the paper removed from the database (although since you submitted it in college, and presumably agreed that it would be turned in to the service, it would probably be replaced in the database).
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Funny)
It goes further than that. Shockingly, many schools are actually known to lock up exams before tests. Even supplies and audiovisual equipment are frequently kept under lock and key. Access to grade records over the internet requires a password. Clearly, they are assuming that everybody is a cheater and thief until proven otherwise....
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)
sounds exactly like slashdot!
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand if you're talking about plagiarism of published works, then yes, tutors should be able to spot this. But I think we're talking about plagiarism of course essays rather than published papers. Of course, examination systems have laways got round this problem quite simply.
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.
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Spare me all this special pleading about the students being "assumed innocent until proven guilty". If that were the case then TAs shouldn't be so nasty as to check out a suspiciously well-written passage, they shouldn't even consider it a possibility.
This is all about cheaters whining because they'll be caught more easily. I agree that it's exactly like drug-testing in athletics and as someone that's been involved in both academia and athletics and hasn't cheated I welcome the introduction of these tests.
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
In effect, a company like Turnitin would only be interested in the student papers from universities that use their service, simply because students from the same university are much more likely to exchange papers without using the internet than with those from other universities. In the case the internet is used, Turnitin is perfectly capable of finding this information for itself, perfectly legit, because it is publically available.
The university that uses Turnitin when explicitly asked would undoubtedly allow Turnitin to use the univerity's entire archive for detecting plagiarism for *their* students. Maybe they would not allow it to be used for other university's students, I would doubt that however.
The point is however that there is very little worth (except maybe for advertising) in collecting papers from one university and trying to apply them to the next, unless these papers are available on the net, in which case they're freely available anyway. Concluding, I think the 'making money of the student's work' argument is far-fetched.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Interesting)
If there's any interest in this, it would be fairly easy to set it up
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)
Oh suuure, you lost it.
And it's just a coincidence that I found a word-for-reserved-word very similar script -- by searching Google. (It's on the site "Napkin Scribblings of Don Knuth, as submitted by janitors, waiters, and graduate students". )
Looks like you "forgot" to cite "your" work. This will go on your permanent record, young man.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
So professors are expected to be familiar with every recycled term paper that is going around on the internet or being sold by term paper mills?
In reality, professors are going to catch plagiarism only if the student happens to copy from a source that the professor is very familiar with. A system where some students get hauled before disciplinary hearings while many others who are doing the same thing get away with high grades hardly seems fair, either.
Unfortunately, students often get away with petty plagiarism all through college, and then move on to graduate school or professional careers where sources are more easily identified, and the penalty for plagiarism tends to be much heavier.
Teaching students what constitutes original scholarship is part of the legitimate mission of the university, so outlawing tools that enable professors to catch cheaters ultimately is harmful to the student.
Still, asking the student to submit his paper to an originality checker seems a bit like a slap in the face, and from a practical point of view, letting the students know just how their papers are going to be checked makes it easier for them to circumvent those measures. It would probably be better simply to inform the students that there papers will be checked for originality without telling them how.
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it's not like the students are paying customers of the University or something. Universities in general are actually WORSE than the *IAAs in terms of pre-emptively accusing people of wrongdoing...inspite of having a "mission" to educate and improve society, all they do anymore is integrate people into the pettiness of corperate culture!
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Insightful)
And, contrary to what you might think, it does not take a huge public scandal for this sort of devaluing to occur. I work for a large investment bank and there are several schools that my fellow development managers and I simply discount when screening new hires straight out of college, simply based on experiences we have collectively had in the past with other students from those schools.
As a paying customer, you should be glad your school cares as much as this one (if your school does, and if you are in school). Your dissatisfaction might be better focused on the fact that students are being asked to hand over original works to a for-profit institution with no compensation. That was the crux of the student's complaint in the article as well.
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Insightful)
The best way for students to prove that they're not breaking the rules, in this case, is to actually do the damned work. We're fortunate that it's become so easy to catch plagiarizers, a method that catches most of the offenders and produces no more false positives than convential methods.
Good students should be applau
Re:Hrmm (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd feel a lot better however if the service performing the analysis were non-profit, and also if it is known that it distills enough from each publication to identify duplication without being able to reproduce it (copyright issues).
Re:Hrmm (Score:5, Informative)
OK lets do some maths here...at the university at which I am a lecturer the average academic has 12 teaching contact hours a week (research, administration, student consultation etc are additional to this). Lets assume that lecturer gives 2 lecturers per week (4 hours). Lets knock a couple of hours off for unit coordination, or other time allowances etc and say that the staff member has 6 1 hour tutorials. Each tutorial has 30 students. That means there are 6x30 (180) potential assignments. Lets call it 150 since some students might not submit assignments for various reasons or they may have extensions and submit the assignment later. Lets say the assignment is a 3000 word report. That means that the staff member has to read 450,000 words, not including direct quotes, appendices etc that are not included in word counts. Just to put that into perspective, according to http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/15/new.p
Lets say that it takes 1/2 hour to mark a report that does not have any plagiarism issues. That means that 75 hours will be spent marking these assignments alone (assuming non-stop marking with no breaks). According to various decision makers in the university, assignments need to be returned to students in 2 weeks (Try reading the Old Testment of the Bible in 2 weeks). This means that in addition to normal hours the lecturer has to find an extra 75 hours over 2 weeks. When we detect plagiarism in a report, we are usually very thorough in its investigation so that if it comes to an appeal, the Is are dotted and the Ts are crossed. This can easily take 2-3 hours per plagiarised assignment (not including time spent later interviewing the student).
This means the staff member has a few options;
1) pretend the plagiarism doesn't exist. However this has the effect of devaluing the univeristy's degrees as employers are wary about employing gradutes when they've had a bad experience in the past. The reputation of a University can be very important and easily lost.
2) Reduce the time spent with dealing with plagiarised assignments through automated plagiarism detection tools. This does not eliminate the time spent on the problem. We never rely solely on the output of an automated tool, beacuse we understand that they generate false positives. However it does take some of the leg work out of it.
3) Spend less time assessing the assignments from students that have done the right thing and done the assignment without plagiarising. In my opinion this is not a good option. I belive that we need to protect the students that do the right thing.
4) Not meet the deadline. Not the best career move.
So no, I don't think it is the job of a lecturer top check for plagiarism. It is something that I shouldn't have to do. When students submit an assignment they sign a cover page which states that any non-original material has been appropriately acknowledged.
Having said all of this, personally I'm not a fan of web based plagairism detection services. I would much rather have a local tool that can check submitted assignments against themselves and a search engine, so that the University maintains control of the assignments.
I'm not sure trust is the issue (Score:3, Insightful)
Hard to tell if trust is the real issue or if your first comment was more telling. One thing for sure, I'm getting seriously tired of this republican attitude of guilty until proven innocent. And that bubbles over into a lot of areas. Check points on roads that inconvenience everyone to check for a few people who have been drinking. Drug testing is another great example. Invade everyone's privacy to weed out few bad actors...one that strangely hasn't affected the actual lev
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 ag
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
PLAGIARISM DETECTED (Score:5, Funny)
This sentence has been detected as being plagiarised from:
Anonymous Coward [slashdot.org]
Grade: F-
Re:Fight plagiarism but not like this (Score:4, Insightful)
That, obviously, is wrong.
Look, a technology like this anti-plagiarism service is just a tool. It may flag an assignment as havng been plagiarised; and having flagged that, it should present the evidence to the teacher who should be the one deciding whether it warrants action or not.
I have been a TA and a teacher. I have caught plagiarists. Usually, if it is just a small code fragment, you just let it go. After all, all of the students are reading from the same books, and looking a the same sample code, and hence could come up with similar snippets. The problem comes when large chunks of the program are the same. Or, if there's been an obvious attempt to hide the copying (changing every variable "i" to "ii").
Often, what used to give the game away was the use of an odd data structure, or an odd language feature. For example: 95% of the students would use a "for" loop, and then 2 assignments would show up with a "repeat until" or a "do while". When asked, the original author would have a pretty good explanation; but the cheater would not have any.
Coming to this case: the student has no right to gripe about this. Saying that he's being considered "guilty until proven innocent" is asinine. By the same token, his assignments shouldn't be graded either: he should just get an "A" to start with!
Would it have been better if the professor had taken his assignment and submitted it to the service? After all, the professor can use whatever tools he likes to help him do his job. And catching plagiarists is a part of his job, unfortunately.
Re:Honor Code (Score:5, Informative)
As for my university, Dalhousie,which makes use of turnitin.com, there are 3 main possibilities with some other less common considerations. First a zero on the paper, which is damn near guaranteed. The second is failure in the course. Thirdly, and the most severe is explusion from the university.
Even if a student was to "get through" the university states that at any given time they may REVOKE the students DEGREE if they are found to have plagarized!
The process is really quite disgusting and strenuous on both profs and students. First, suspected cases have to be turned into the Senate Discipline Committee, which then sets up a hearing and at some point summons you to this hearing.
I can tell you from experience, that many of my professors dread the process and truly hate turnitin.com. They would much rather catch the plagarism themselves and deal with it in their own way. However, the profs career is even at risk if they don't follow university policy and submit to this discipline commitee.
The worst thing about it is the guilty until innocent approach that seems to have been taken. When you have be accused to have plagarized, you must PROVE and EXPLAIN how you didn't. Thank-you democracy.
Lastly, although I haven't plagarized, my friend came really close to undergoing this process. He passed in a history essay, and it was also submitted it to turnitin.com, the result was a bunch of flagged sections. Upon closer observation and discussion with the professor, it turned out that the material was all properly cited. Instead the stupid turnitin.com program/process said the sentence structure was close to other sentences in hundreds of other essays. For example, imagine going to a magazine, and flipping through 45 pages looking for the sentence "The cat is hungry" by piecing together the words for that sentence by grabbing these words over all of the 45 pages in the magazine. Remember that simpsons episode where Homers mom came back (this season I believe) and he got the message from reading the news paper.
Maybe this is why the profs don't like it. All I know is that it has created a really negative atmosphere in the university, that coupled with my $7000 tution sometimes makes me wonder why I pay for this pain.
You guys can check out our discipline thingy here
PLAGARISM [registrar.dal.ca] The best part is the self-plagarism policy!
Re:Honor Code (Score:3, Informative)
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 at
Re:Sumbit PDF with images (Score:4, Insightful)
How proud you are! You were able to deliberately make someone's life more difficult, and I'm sure you bragged about it to your friends, and they smiled and told you how "cool" you were that you made things tougher on a grown-up.
A professor has a certain amount of time, and many professional duties. Scholarship, teaching, and service. By asking you to submit things electronically, the professor was hoping to spend more time doing what you are paying him for, reading your work carefully. But yes, by finding a loophole, you were able to take his time away from grading the smart kids' papers so he could read your smartass paper.
And now you brag about it in slashdot. Someday you may be an adult in a position where you are asking for results from somebody, and I hope you don't have to deal with "You didn't say they couldn't be in base 8" "You didn't say they had to be in English" "You didn't say I couldn't smear excrement on them first"
It annoys me when people deliberately make other people's jobs harder.