Thursday, February 1, 2001

tech.life@school | Joyce Kasman Valenza

Teachers battling electronic plagiarism

It's gotten an awful lot easier for students to cheat themselves out of an education.

Plagiarism is nothing new. But, as I see it, electronic access to information and the ability to manipulate it facilitates three new types of plagiarism.

Some students intentionally cut and paste paragraphs from a variety of digital sources, keenly aware that their teachers are not likely to spend hours on the Web trying to track down all the original documents.

Others use the same cut-and-paste method, changing a few words here and there, neglecting to cite their paraphrasing, likely unaware that their efforts in reorganizing and paraphrasing are indeed a form of plagiarism. Then there are students who simply buy their papers off a growing number of "paper mill" Web sites. Those essay-exchange sites are growing in number and designed to seduce, with offers of "instant gratification," "low prices," "high quality" and "quick delivery to your browser." Such sites are easy to find. Yahoo lists several under the category of shopping.

So what's a teacher to do?

Teachers can be proactive by avoiding topical research - the state, the president or the country report - in favor of projects that force students into original thought. They can require students to submit outlines, concept maps, and working bibliographies well in advance of the due date. They can ask students to annotate their bibliographies, describing the credentials of the writers and defending the importance of the source in their research. They can ask students to submit pages of their best sources.

And teachers can now respond with a few Web tools of their own and shift the balance of power in the struggle for academic integrity. "In classes that use plagiarism-detection software, plagiarism drops very significantly," said Alex Aiken, cofounder of Digital Integrity Inc. and associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. "Students need to know what the policy on using copied material is, and they need to know that plagiarism-detection software is being used." Aiken's company, Digital Integrity, offers the free Findsame site, at www.findsame.com, a service capable of finding documents on the Web that match selected chunks of text. "Users submit an entire document, and we return a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document longer than about one line of text," said Aiken. "Users simply enter a URL, paste text into the field, or upload a file, then click the search button and we will display where on the Web any piece of the text . . . appears."

John Barrie, whose actual degree is in biophysics, finds himself more popularly known as the "prince of ethics." Barrie founded http://turnitin.com (formerly known as plagiarism.org) and is president of Iparadigms Inc., a company that tracks digital intellectual property for business clients. Secondary-school subscriptions to the service cost $1 per student for the academic year. College subscriptions are determined on a sliding scale. But anyone can use the service up to five times for free. Though the company's major profits come from industry, Barrie told me that the academic side of the business is thriving and he believes that sites that screen student papers for plagiarism function well as psychological deterrents.

The greatest numbers of plagiarists are of the cut-and-paste school. "At least 75 percent of the papers we catch as highly unoriginal are mosaics. If a student's term paper was on Gothic architecture, he might choose 10 documents off a result list and use a paragraph from each one, adding some transitions, an opening and a conclusion and changing a few words," said Barrie.

When a teacher searches for evidence that the paper is plagiarized, "it's a total crapshoot that they've chosen the right phrase," said Barrie. "If the student changes one word, then you won't find it in a regular search engine." Barrie said the Turnitin.com engine searches deeper: "The teacher gets back an annotated version, in which every phrase that matches another source is underlined and color-coded relative to the source." When schools subscribe, typically a teacher would ask students to submit their papers into the service's electronic drop box. Students can use the service to read and learn from one another's papers, and as an originality check against unintended plagiarism in much the same way that they now use spell and grammar checkers. As more student documents are added to the database, the screening feature extends beyond the free Web to include previously submitted papers, material plagiarized from books, and subscription services on the Web.

And the database creates a powerful deterrent. "Students are aware that there is a hundred percent chance they'll be caught and that the people who may have shared their work will be caught, too," Barrie said. "The only way to stop cheating in the form of plagiarism is to provide a centralized database that can be shared by instructors," said Barrie, who explained that the cheat sites make money by recycling papers. As more of those essays are submitted to a database such as the one at Turnitin.com, the papers become worthless. The database also makes it impossible for a student to submit the same paper to two different teachers.

"And if students have plagiarized documents from print sources," Barrie said, "those non-electronic sources are also entered into the database for future checking." Barrie said that his "business is good." The database is growing quickly. "We have proctors at our exams and referees at our games," Barrie said. "It boggles my mind that the educational community hasn't taken a more proactive approach in putting safeguards in place for preventing plagiarism. We need referees for our term papers. Technology puts those needed safeguards in place."

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Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield High School in Erdenheim, Pa. Her column appears each week in tech.life. E-mail: joyce.valenza@phillynews.com

Resources for Preventing Plagiarism On the Web

Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers (Vanguard University) www.vanguard.edu/rharris/antiplag.htm

Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm

MLA: A Statement on Plagiarism http://webster.commnet.edu/mla/plagiarism.htm

Plagiarism Prevention Web Page www.uwplatt.edu/~library/reference/plagiarism.htmlx

Plagiarism Stoppers www.ncusd203.org/central/html/where/plagiarism_stoppers.html

Internet Paper Mills (a list of the cheat sites) www.coastal.edu/library/mills2.htm

Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm

New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html

Plagiarism: What it is and How to Recognize and Avoid It http://webster.commnet.edu/mla/plagiarism.htm

Plagiarism Avoided: Taking Responsibility for Your Work www.arts.ubc.ca/doa/plagiarism.htm#anchor406793

Student Plagiarism in an Online World www.asee.org/prism/december/html/student_plagiarism_in_an_onlin.htm

Writing Place Tips for Writers www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html

Writing: Plagiarism Advice for Lessons (Grades 1-12) http://henson.austin.apple.com/edres/ellesson/elem-writplagerism.shtml

Online Plagiarism Screening Services

Eve2.2 www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml

IntegriGuard www.integriguard.com/

Turnitin.com http://turnitin.com/new.html

How Original.Com www.howoriginal.com/Default.htm

Plagiarism.org www.plagiarism.org

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