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DOC Cop Delivers Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools

A new service has been launched to help instructors in both higher education and K-12 institutions detect plagiarized work submitted by students. The service, DOC Cop, is an entirely Web-based tool that provides free and automated assistance in locating "source material" (ahem) used in assignments submitted to teachers.

DOC Cop was developed by Mark McCrohon, who previously worked in an Australian university and told us he got the idea from the system as he witnessed students colluding on work that was supposed to be an individual effort and turning in duplicate assignments to multiple professors.

"Often teachers and professors are oblivious to the amount of plagiarism and collusion by students so they are not even aware that they need to do something about it," McCrohon told us. "DOC Cop really helps in exposing the size of the collusion problem."

The service is available free of charge and requires only a valid e-mail address to use, which allows for a degree of anonymity. Also, according to the company, the service does not store work submitted for detection longer than the period required to perform the plagiarism check.

The service provides three types of checks:

  • DOC Check, which evaluates individual documents--up to five at a time, 250,000 word maximum each--against one another;
  • Corpus Check, which evaluates an unlimited number of documents (up to 12,000 words each) against one another; and
  • Web Check, which compares strings of text (up to 550 words) against results found on the Web.

Both DOC Check and Corpus Check offer an unlimited number of checks per day per guest account. Web Check supports limited uses per day, depending on the load on the system at ay given time.

Submitted works are checked, and the results are returned to the user via e-mail in less than an hour. McCrohon told us he's seeing the service used by K-12 and higher education instructors to check their students' work and by university researchers to check their own work against content on the Web in order to avoid accidental plagiarism.

McCrohon said he intends to keep the service free and that he hopes to fund continued development (and ongoing costs) by getting academic institutions to promote themselves on the site.

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About the Author

Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com. He can now be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/THEJournalDave (K-12) or http://twitter.com/CampusTechDave (higher education).

Comments

Sun, Mar 7, 2010 sultan Tahir pakistan peshawar

Dear Management , thanks for great services to stidents & teachers, Best regards

Sat, May 16, 2009

In this chapter I am going to describe the notion of norms from the perspective of English school of international relations. Using English school theory of international relations and their study of norms in my paper I will try to offer a theoretical and methodological approach of researching international norms. Consequently, in my research I will try to elucidate on such questions as what is the international norms, and what role do norms play in international politics, how do they work in international politics. What is the international norm and how they work. First of all an international norm is characterized as a standard of behavior. Secondly, the concept of norms power is introduced by a theoretical discussion of how easily the international norms change and also the role of great powers play in norm change. During my further resear

Tue, Feb 24, 2009

Recent research has shown that ecological degradation can act as a cause of violent conflicts. Most of the scholastic research and media reports on the causes of the current conflict in Darfur focussed on ecological degradation and ethnicity as the root causes of the conflict. According to O’Fahy (2004), the prolonged periods of drought of the 1980s and the creeping desert caused permanent visits of entire nomadic tribes from Northern Darfur to Southern Darfur. These North-South movements of nomadic groups have been blamed for intensifying competition for depleted local natural resources, and as a consequence tribal confrontations between farmers and nomads became inevitable. It should be noted that competition between settled farmers and nomads has always been a feature of the local natural resources-based conflicts in Darfur for over several decades, and that tribal conflicts are not a new phenomenon. The first tribal conflict recorded in the modern history of Darfur was in 1932 between the Kababish, the Berti, the Kawahla, and the Medoub and in the last three decades Darfur has witnessed more than 40 grassroots conflicts.

While the argument on ecological degradation is valid in the case of tribal conflicts and disputes it, nevertheless, cannot sufficiently explain the current conflict in the region because it limits the understanding of the Darfur conflict as emanating from ecological degradation and thus disregarding such importance aspects as economic or political. In such case the crucial issues of the economy, the state and politics are inadvertently pushed aside. One important question that has often been raised in the literature is whether Darfur’s natural resources, in terms of land, pasture and water are depleted. While pointing out that conflicts have always existed over these resources Fouad (2004) argued that the natural resources of Darfur are not meagre at all.

Many researchers have also portrayed the current conflict in Darfur region as an ethnic conflict between Africans and Arabs. However, a number of reasons cast serious doubts on the validity of this view. Firstly, historically different ethnic groups in Darfur generally used to live peacefully and, ethnicity has only recently become a factor in tribal conflicts. In fact, until before the end of the 1980s, inter-Arab conflicts were the main feature of grassroots conflicts in Darfur.

Wed, Jan 21, 2009

This is a great idea.

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