[Air-l] FW: <toc>--Cheat-detection software (Economist.com)
Michael Gurstein
mgurst at vcn.bc.ca
Sun Mar 24 04:46:44 PST 2002
Please note that my comments on "Plagiarism and Napster" were meant as a
commentary on developments such as below, rather than on any particular
contribution to this list and particularly not Lori Kendall's very
innovative approaches to the matter as outlined in her recent post.
MG
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http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1033832
Mar 14th 2002
Economist.com
Cheat-detection software
Plagiarise. Let no one else's work evade your eyes
A window of opportunity for intellectual cheats is closing fast
EVER since Al Gore invented it, the Internet has been a paradise for
those with a creative attitude to facts. Students, for example,
commission and sell essays with such ease there that online "paper
mills" devoted to this trade are one of the few dotcom business
models still thriving. With a few clicks of a mouse, a student can
outsource any academic chore to "research" sites such as Gradesaver.com
or the Evil House of Cheat.
One market opportunity, however, frequently creates another. The past few
months have seen a rapid rise in interest in software designed to catch
the cheats. The subscriber base of Turnitin, a leading anti-plagiarism
software house based in Oakland, California, has risen by 25% since the
beginning of the year. Around 150,000 students in America alone are under
its beady electronic eye. And in Britain, the Joint Information Systems
Committee, the unit responsible for advising the country's universities
on information technology, has tested the firm's software in five
colleges. If all goes well, every university lecturer in the country will
soon be able to vet his students' submissions with it.
Turnitin's software chops each paper submitted for scrutiny into small
pieces of text. The resulting "digital fingerprint" is compared, using
statistical techniques originally designed to analyse brain waves (John
Barrie, the firm's founder, was previously a biophysicist), to more than
a billion documents that have been fingerprinted in a similar fashion.
These include the contents of online paper mills, the classics of
literature and the firm's own archive of all submitted term papers, as
well as a snapshot of the current contents of the World Wide Web.
Whenever a matching pattern is found, the software makes a note. After
highlighting instances of replication, or obvious paraphrasing (according
to Turnitin, some 30% of submitted papers are "less than original"), the
computer running the software returns the annotated document to the
teacher who originally submitted it--leaving him with the final decision
on what is and is not permissible.
Which teachers and institutions will choose to employ such software? Past
research has shown that, perhaps surprisingly, academic dishonesty
correlates with high academic achievement. Nor is public exposure of
widespread cheating likely to burnish a university's reputation.
Universities with the highest-achieving students and the most unsullied
reputations may therefore have the most to lose from anti-plagiarism
software. Indeed, a curious pattern has emerged among Turnitin's clients:
good universities, such as Duke, Rutgers and Cornell, employ it. Those
that like to think of themselves as top-notch, such as Princeton, Yale
and Stanford, do not. According to Dr Barrie, "You apply our technology
at Harvard and it would be like a nuclear bomb going off."
Explosions are happening lower down the academic ladder, as well. In
January Christine Pelton, a biology teacher in Kansas, was forced out of
her job for using Turnitin's software. Just before Christmas she had run
118 essays though the mill, and found that 28 had been plagiarised.
Naturally, she failed the cheats. But rather than thank her, the parents
of some of those cheats reacted with indignation. They forced the local
school board to order her to pass the offenders, and she resigned in
protest. Clearly, shooting the messenger has not yet gone out of fashion.
http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1033832
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