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Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom
4/29/2003
Plagiarism-Detecting Web Sites
Plagiarism.org maintains a database of thousands of digitally fingerprinted
documents including papers obtained from term-paper mills. According to Plagiarism.org,
when an instructor uploads a student's paper to the site, the document's "fingerprint"
is cross-referenced against the local database containing hundreds of thousands
of papers. At the same time, automated Web crawlers are released to scour the
rest of the Internet for possible matches. The instructor receives a custom,
color-coded "originality report," complete with source links, for each paper.
For a fee, this service will detect papers that are entirely plagiarized, papers
that include plagiarism from different sources, or papers that have bits and
pieces of plagiarized text (www.plagiarism.org).
However, educators must remember that even though plagiarism-detecting software
can identify plagiarized text, it may not highlight the quotation marks surrounding
the text or the reference to the text within the paper. An overzealous professor
could hastily accuse a student of plagiarism by running their paper through
plagiarism-detecting software and then fail to revisit the paper to verify whether
the identified text was referenced.
Internet detection services, both fee-based and non-fee-based, are on the rise. Many educators would find this growth positive, however, a March 2002 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that two plagiarism detection Web sites, PlagiServe.com and EduTie.com, appear to have ties to Web sites that sell term papers to students. Apparently, the companies that were checking student papers for plagiarism were then selling those same papers through its term-paper mills. Although the allegations were denied by both companies, the possible conflict of interest is a reminder to educators to be cautious in submitting student papers to unsubstantiated sites (Young, 2002).
Plagiarism-Detecting Software
Many software companies have developed innovative programs for detecting plagiarism.
Glatt Plagiarism Services Inc. produces the Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program,
which eliminates every fifth word of the suspected student's paper and replaces
the words with a blank space. The student is asked to supply the missing words.
The number of correct responses, the amount of time intervening, and various
other factors are considered in assessing the final Plagiarism Probability Score.
This program is based on Wilson Taylor's (1953) cloze procedure, which was originally
used to test reading comprehension (www.plagiarism.com).
Internet Search Engines
Educators may also find the more popular Internet search engines to be a useful
tool in plagiarism detection. Google, Yahoo, Excite, AskJeeves, HotBot, GoTo,
AltaVista, and MetaCrawler are just a few of the search engines that can aid
an instructor in detection. When an instructor suspects a student of copying
text or notices an inconsistency in a student's writing style, he or she can
enter the suspect phrase into the search engine. The search engine will return
a listing of all websites that contain an exact match of the entered text. Instructors
can broaden their results by searching a few different search engines (Heberling,
2002).
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