Tag: Plagiarism

Categories
Academic Digital

Tips for detecting and beating plagiarism

whatisPlagiarism
From University of Connecticut

Appears to be disappointingly common in HE:

Detecting ghost-written essays is a tricky task for academics.

Written by other academics or postgraduates to student specifications, these scripts are not the easly identifiable copy-and-paste efforts that anti-plagiarism software is so adept at catching.

But they often still leave behind clues to their illicit origin, according to Ann Rogerson, lecturer in organisational behaviour at the University of Wollongong, in Australia.

Ms Rogerson – who spoke at the 6th International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference held in Gateshead this week – began to investigate the issue after suspecting that a high level of cheating was taking place on one of her postgraduate courses for international students.

Read full article.

Categories
Digital

Catching out the Plagiarists?

mgylInqInteresting … although a real focus on ‘trying to catch people out’ I feel… how do we look for more positive ways of dealing with this (e.g. assignments that require reflection on the process, etc.):

As efforts to detect student plagiarism get more sophisticated, a university is considering bolstering the weapons in its armoury against a growing form of misconduct, “contract” cheating.

The term refers to students handing in bespoke essays purchased through essay-writing sites. But according to Mark Ridolfo, associate dean for student experience at Bournemouth University’s Business School, the phenomenon is difficult to detect and prove.

Because assignments are written from scratch, contract cheating gets around plagiarism detection software, and although other tools that detect changes in writing style exist, they can be slow, inaccurate and expensive, he said.

Detecting this kind of cheating “is almost impossible, incredibly time-consuming and, even when you have suspicions, going through to the next stage of the process [an academic offence panel] is difficult,” he said.

Read full article, although it’s hard for students when they see staff being caught out plagiarising?

Categories
Digital

Creating appropriate assessment environments

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1025343

Working on projects related to re-designing assessments (with a particular focus on using technology), and with colleagues with a particular interest in plagiarism (see p.39), an interesting story this week in Times Higher Education:

It is, of course, a serious academic offence to pass off somebody else’s work as your own. Universities are in the business of accrediting students as having acquired certain knowledge and skills, and it is a fraud on potential employers if students have cheated in their assessments. Yet research suggests that plagiarism is much more widespread than most academics realise, to the extent that degree standards are in serious danger.

University administrations have responded to the problem of plagiarism by treating it as a crime. They issue dire warnings of heavy penalties for the offence; they use advanced methods of detection, such as Turnitin; and they have complex, quasi-judicial procedures for dealing with cases that are detected. However, the way students are taught and assessed is a far more significant factor in the occurrence of plagiarism than the criminal intentions of a small minority of students. If we are to improve the situation, we need to design the possibility of cheating out of the system, rather than focusing all our efforts on detection and punishment. There is no single change that can miraculously make plagiarism go away, but there are a number of things that can be done (and other things to be avoided) that together make plagiarism virtually unthinkable for students.

Read full story.

Categories
Digital

Plagiarism

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/461616

Means to combat plagiarism? Technology? Learning? What is likely to be more successful:

David Matthews reports on debate about whether claiming students’ IP rights could halt plagiarism

A senior figure at Oxford Brookes University has suggested taking control of undergraduates’ intellectual property rights to stop them selling their essays on the internet.

John Francis, director of research and business development, said that the market in essays was “quite difficult to control” and that the university currently had no “formal rights” to stop it.

The idea has sparked a debate on how to stop the sale of essays and has also drawn claims that any blanket ownership of students’ intellectual property (IP) could be illegal.

Writing on JISCmail, an academic email discussion forum, Mr Francis said that an increasing number of students were selling their essays and that this could potentially damage the university’s reputation.

“We have been considering ways to strengthen our position on the practice to prevent it,” he wrote. “One way could be to claim ownership of all undergraduate and postgraduate IP. We only claim IP from PG [postgraduate] research students at the moment.”

Read full story.

Categories
Academic Digital

Plagiarism Software

My colleague, Nicole McNab, has looked at plagiarism quite extensively over the past couple of years, so this has gained my interest … especially as Nicole tends towards the idea that TurnItIn, etc. should not be used for detection, but for training students to understand!

Students who are aware that their work will be checked by plagiarism-detection software are just as likely to cheat as those who are not, a study suggests.

Turnitin software, which is used by thousands of universities worldwide, extracts text from submitted essays and checks it against other sources, such as online documents.

However, the study conducted by a researcher at California State University suggests that such measures should not be regarded as a “silver bullet” in the battle against “deviant” academic practices.

Robert J. Youmans, a cognitive psychologist, says in the paper published in the journal Studies in Higher Education that he expected to find that fewer students would cheat if they were warned that their work would be scanned.

This proved not to be the case.

Read full story.