Resources on plagiarism deterrence and detection

Online resources on plagiarism deterrence and detection

Stephen Bostock

Educational Developments 5.3, 2004

By plagiarism, we mean passing off someone else's work as your own for your own benefit (Carroll 2002). It includes collusion and other fraudulent authorship. The last several years have seen a rise in interest in plagiarism; it's harder to know whether there has been a rise in the incidence of plagiarism itself. Whatever its frequency, it undermines academic standards and is an affront to good teaching and conscientious learners. Like all “crime”, it is better to deter than to detect and punish, but the likelihood of detection is a part of deterrence. Much plagiarism now involves electronic copying and pasting from the Internet, and scare stories appear regularly in the press (e.g. Plagiarism soars as students crib from internet [1]). Where technology has worsened the problem it can also be part of the solution, and the last few years has seen a growth in the availability of software for detecting both collusion and Internet sources.

Plagiarism should not be isolated from principles of assessment that encourage and measure real understanding. So, although the detection of an un-cited source in a piece of student work might seem like an isolated, technical problem, it is, in fact, part of a web of principles and good practice in assessment that is not at all simple, but is necessary. Indeed, Alan Dordoy, in Cheating and Plagiarism: Student and Staff Perceptions at Northumbria, [2] wondered if cheating may not be a rational response by students to a Higher Education system out of alignment, both internally and with its social purposes (Proceedings of Northumbria Conference 2002 - Educating for the Future [3]).

Plagiarism and Poor Academic Practice – A Threat to the Extension of e-Learning in Higher Education? [4] by Mike Hart and Tim Friesner, is available in the Electronic Journal on e-Learning (Volume 2 Issue 1 February 2004 pp. 89-96). They review the evidence for the growth in plagiarism, its reasons, and policies to combat it. They suggest three strategies to prevent it: assess processes as well as outcomes; reward original and critical thinking; and use technology to design new patterns of teaching and assessment. More comprehensive, yet very readable, is "In other (People's) Words: plagiarism by university students - literature and lessons" by Chris Park (2003, if you are lucky enough to have good access to the electronic journal). He concludes: "there is a growing need for institutions to develop cohesive frameworks for dealing with student plagiarism that are based on prevention supported by robust detection and penalty systems that are transparent and applied consistently" (pp. 483-484).

The best single source of advice is the Plagiarism Advisory Service [5], funded by the JISC. There are good resources under Advice and Guidance, Good Practice, Plagiarism Detection (traditional and electronic), and materials for students, plus three recent reports on the different attitudes to plagiarism of students from different cultures.

The associated JISC plagiarism detection service [6] is an online service that enables institutions and staff to carry out electronic comparison of students' work against electronic sources including other students' work. Once an institution has a contract with the service (currently free), staff are given logins with which to upload electronic copies of student work, singly or in batches. Students can also be allowed to upload their own work. Detection is quick and the reports show student work colour coded against the sources of any files with matching text. Based on a commercial service in the USA, this service is tailored to UK needs and avoids the problems with the Data Protection Act of sending material outside the European Community. It would be the service of choice even if it were not free. The site includes a demonstration [7] of how the software works and looks.

At the other end of the scale of detection is the quick and simple Google search engine [8]: type a phrase of up to 10 words, in quotes, into Google and, if it is on the public Web, there is a good chance it will be returned at the top of the hit list. The snag is that you must first select a phrase that arouses suspicion, so Google cannot be used to automatically scan one or more pieces of work.

With the availability of the JISCPAS, there is not much point in considering other web sites providing plagiarism detection. Nonetheless, there is a review of software tools at the plagiarism resource at the LTSN Information and Computer Sciences at Warwick [9]. Plagiarism in natural and programming languages: an overview of current tools and technologies [10] is a very thorough review by Paul Clough in July 2000. There are links to other reviews of software [11] at the Center for Intellectual Property.

If you want to run software on your local PC that detects matches with material on the Internet, you could consider the Essay Verification Engine (EVE)[12]. This can be bought online and is very cheap. It accepts batches of local documents to check, but in my experience is very slow with long documents. Set it going when you leave the office for home! EVE does not compare student work but CopyCatch [13] does. It can also compare a batch of student reports with other standard documents you provide. There is a free version for the UK. It needs the Java™ Runtime Environment [14] installed so I would use a fairly modern computer for adequate speed. Textus Lite Software [15] (which I did not manage to get working) claims to detect both collusion as between two local documents and matches of the contents of many documents against the public Web. You are given a free trial of 21 runs.

None of this software actually detects plagiarism, of course. It detects matches of some text in one document with that in another local document or in a web page. If the matching text is a literal quotation, properly cited, then no problem! So manual checking of the matches is always necessary before cheating (or, at best, poor writing style) can be confirmed. Another limitation is the use of “paper mills” by students - essay banks on web sites where essays can be bought, for example EssayBank [16]. As the essays are not on the public Web they will not be indexed in Google or other search engines. However, such essays may be easily detectable manually - with a US style and rather off the topic! On the other hand, bespoke fraudulent authorship, such as Elizabeth Hall [17], may be hard to detect if you do not know a student's work.

There is plenty of advice for staff on helping students to avoid plagiarism. A briefing on plagiarism [18] by Lorraine Stefani and Jude Carroll (2001), is in the Generic LTSN [19] resources database. One of the series of briefings on aspects of assessment, at 16 pages it is a wise introduction. It rightly concludes that we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater by returning to traditional assessment methods like closed exams in order to prevent cheating, thus reducing the quality of student learning - our primary goal. (The online version is actually more legible than the glossy print version.) A shorter Briefing Paper on Prevention, detection and punishment [20] by Ranald Macdonald is at the LTSN Physical Sciences [21] web site.

Resources for students include Cite them right: referencing made easy [22] by Richard Pears and Graham Shields, a resource to recommend. Freely available in its first edition, the new edition can be purchased for a modest fee. Plagiarism and how to avoid it [23] by David Gardner at the University of Hong Kong is a good practice guide with a self-test. Other tutorials with self-tests are at Toronto Plagiarism self-test [24], the University of Essex Plagiarism site [25], and Indiana University's How to Recognize Plagiarism [26].

For further sources, the Archives [27] of the discussion forum related to the JISCPAS, PLAGIARISM@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, go back over two years. You can browse them without being a list member. More links are available at the Keele web site supporting learning and teaching [28], and the English LTSN Centre [29] also has a page of links on plagiarism [30]. Carroll (2002) has a page of supporting links [31].

References

Carroll, J. 2002 A handbook for deterring plagiarism in higher education Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University

Park C. 2003 In other (People's) Words: plagiarism by university students - literature and lessons, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education volume 28, issue 5, pp. 471-488

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the usefulness of the Netskills materials [32] on detecting and deterring plagiarism. Your institution may subscribe to these, giving you access. This review updates that by Graham Alsop and Chris Tompsett in Educational Developments 2.3 (August 2001)

An electronic copy of this review with linked resources can be found on www.seda.ac.uk

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/07/17/nplag17.xml&

[2] http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/LTA/media/docs/Conference%20Publication%202002/AD.doc

[3] http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/LTA/media/docs/Conference%20Publication%202002/

[4] http://www.ejel.org/volume-2/vol2-issue1/issue1-art25-abstract.htm

[5] http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/information_studies/Imri/Jiscpas/site/jiscpas.asp

[6] http://www.submit.ac.uk/

[7] http://www.submit.ac.uk/static_jisc/ac_uk_demo.html

[8] http://www.google.co.uk/

[9] http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/ltsn-ics/resources/plagiarism/

[10] http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~cloughie/plagiarism/HTML_Version/index.html

[11] http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/links_plagiarism.html#evaluation

[12] http://www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml

[13] http://www.copycatchgold.com/copycatchesreview.htm

[14] http://www.java.com/en/download/faq/index.jsp

[15] http://www.thetext.co.uk/download.html

[16] http://www.essaybank.com/

[17] http://www.elizabethhall.com/

[18] http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/application.asp?app=resources.asp&process=full_record&section=generic&id=10

[19] http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/genericcentre/index.asp

[20] http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/briefing_papers/plag6.htm

[21] http://dbweb.liv.ac.uk/ltsnpsc/default.htm

[22] http://www.unn.ac.uk/central/isd/cite/

[23] http://ec.hku.hk/plagiarism/introduction.htm

[24] http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~writing/interactive-plagiarismtest.html

[25] http://www.essex.ac.uk/plagiarism/Contents.htm

[26] http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/

[27] http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/plagiarism.html

[28] http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/aa/landt/links/plagiarism.htm

[29] http://www.english.ltsn.ac.uk/index.htm

[30] http://www.english.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/topic/plagiarism/plaglinks.htm

[31] http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/4_resource/plagiarism.html

[32] http://materials.netskills.ac.uk/