Plagiarism: IT-Enabled Tools for Deceit?
The other day, a call came in to a faculty support team from an instructor
with what has become an increasing concern: a paper submitted for a class assignment
didn’t seem representative of the student’s prior work. Red flags
were raised. Was this a case of plagiarism? How could the professor check?
Faculty fear of plagiarism is, sadly, legitimate. Web sites continue to proliferate
offering term papers, short essays, and reports of one sort or another at anywhere
from $7 to $30 per page. Their increasing availability certainly suggests there
is a market.
While we condemn submitting the words of others in place of one’s own,
we fail to look at why this happens. The answer is not so simple. Some of the
transgressions collected under the plagiarism banner include failure to attribute
the source of an extensive quotation, not formally recognizing the originator
of an idea, using phrases of others without indicating so with quotation marks,
and, of course, wholesale downloading of term papers. Some transgressions are
omissions, others a failure to understand the ethics of copyright.
No faculty member should tolerate a downloaded paper. There are software tools
that can help. Send the text of a student’s paper to one of a number of
services that will search the Internet for matches. A handful are free, but
the majority, like the paper sites, are commercial ventures, and their effectiveness
varies. Depending on the sophistication of the comparison tool, subscription
paper sites may be inaccessible. But they assuage some faculty anxiety and catch
those students whose laziness extends not just to writing the paper but to the
method of procuring it.
How do they work? Most rely on statistically based vocabulary cross-checking
and comparison of structural recurrences in text passages. For example, www.turnitin.com
uses a plagiarism-checking algorithm that appears to rely on word similarity
or identity. This assumes that most students will not bother to make wholesale
lexical or structural changes to the material they copy.
Other services develop a digital “fingerprint” that is used to search
across a wider swath of possible Web sources. But they do so at a cost of their
own. The submitted papers may be added to the plagiarism-checking databases,
violating the student’s intellectual property rights in the process.
Plagiarism isn’t limited to text, however. The increasing complexity of
software programs makes it harder to detect the use of computer code copied
from one program and inserted into another. Alex Aiken at the University of
California, Berkeley, has developed an open source software program for comparing
software code for similarity (www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html).
What relationship do faculty members want to have with their students: enforcer
and violator, or mentor and apprentice? The technology of document distribution
(e.g., paper mills) and the tools of copyright prevention (plagiarism checkers)
will co-evolve. Instead, we should examine why students choose to plagiarize.
Do they value the learning opportunities in class? Do the writing assignments
challenge them and help them find relevance in their lives and experiences?
What happens to the written assignments that are submitted? Are they woven back
into the course to help students?
Writing in the November 16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rebecca
Moore Howard, associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University,
admonishes us that the shortcomings of faculty are not an excuse for students’
plagiarism (chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm):
“We deprive our students of an authentic audience if we assign papers
that are due at the end of the term and that the students never see again. We
deprive them of an interested audience if we scrawl a grade and ‘good work’
on a paper—and nothing else. We deprive them of a respectful audience if
we tear apart the style, grammar, and mechanics of their papers, marking every
error and accusing them of illiteracy for their split infinitives, without ever
talking with them about what they were trying to accomplish, how they might
achieve their goals, and why all the style, grammar, and mechanics matter anyhow.”
In short, we would be wise to take a closer look at the pedagogy enlisted in
the search for knowledge, and its relevance to students’ lives, before
calling in the plagiarism police.
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Selected Anti-Plagiarism Sites
Plagiarism.org
Self-described “online resource for educators concerned with the
growing problem of Internet plagiarism.”
www.plagiarism.org
and www.turnitin.com
Plagiarized.com
“The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism.”
www.plagiarized.com
PaperBin.com
A commercial service that checks student papers against its paper database.
It bills itself as a plagiarism-prevention service.
www.paperbin.com
EVE (Essay Verification Engine)
A downloadable application that performs complex searches against text,
Microsoft Corp. Word files, and Corel Corp. WordPerfect files.
www.canexus.com
PlagiServe
A free site that checks against paper mill sites to find copied text.
www.plagiserve.com
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Anti-Plagiarism Resources
The Center for Academic Integrity
An association of more than 225 institutions that provides a forum for
identifying and promoting the values of academic integrity.
www.academicintegrity.org
What is Plagiarism?
Guidelines from the Georgetown University Honor Council.
www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html
Avoiding Plagiarism
Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial Affairs at the University
of California, Davis.
sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm
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