Posts Tagged ‘plagiarism’

Turnitin.com and file formats

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Upload buttonThe anti-plagiarism service that we subscribe to, turnitin.com, will accept student papers in a variety of file formats. On the rare occasion when a student has a word processing program that the service is unfamiliar with, or a file format that the service does not yet accept, there is a simple work-around for students. When they click on the submit button (shown to the right), they can change the first drop-down menu from "Single file upload" to "Cut & paste upload."

Cut & paste

This will allow students to submit a paper from any word processing application, even an online service like Google Docs.

Tags: , ,
Posted in faculty, student, tech, workshop | 1 Comment »

Ethics of American Youth, 2008

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

Since 1992, the Josephson Institute has conducted a bi-annual survey of more than 20,000 teens, focusing on honesty and integrity. The 2008 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth was released over the Thanksgiving weekend, and shows that teens consider themselves honest despite reporting troubling behaviors. For example, 19 percent of students at religious schools admitted to shoplifting within the last year. Whether this can be believed or not is suspect because 39 percent of students at religious schools admitted to lying to save money. It is not just about money though, as 83 percent admitted to lying to their parents about "something significant."

We've got lying and stealing; how about cheating? "Cheating in school continues to be rampant and it's getting worse," declared the press release. The press release continues:

A substantial majority (64 percent) cheated on a test during the past year (38 percent did so two or more times), up from 60 percent and 35 percent, respectively, in 2006. There were no gender differences on the issue of cheating on exams.

The data tables for each question are available, as are the full results, and those broken down by various demographic features. Some of the responses are quite disturbing - especially when you look at the results for students attending religious schools. There are some good conversations in this data for us, as well as students.

[With thanks to Adrian O'Keefe.]

Tags: ,
Posted in culture, student | Comments Off

Unintentional plagiarism

Friday, November 21st, 2008

In looking at new Acceptable Use Policies for student laptops, I ran across two good resources for plagiarism.  The first comes from the parent company of turnitin.com and addresses the issue of unintentional plagiarism:

The short version here is for students to learn the lesson: "When in doubt, cite sources." Of course, higher on that same page, the site discusses intentional plagiarism. This clearly happens at SI as well as the unintentional. Both are teachable moments.

The second resource is from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction; it is a whole website with pages for students, parents, and teachers alike. The page on the characteristics of plagiarism, identifying what is acceptable and unacceptable, would be good for students to see.

The back-up plan for plagiarism, after educating our students fails, is turnitin.com. If you are ever interested in using the service, please let me know; I would be happy to show you everything you might need to know to use turnitin.com - and best, that would take all of 15-minutes!

Tags:
Posted in student, tech | Comments Off

The Term Paper Artist

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

There is a fascinating essay at Drexel University's Smart Set, "The Term Paper Artist" by Nick Mamatas. The writer used to write papers for other college students; he made enough money doing this that it partially financed his first home.

The term paper biz is managed by brokers who take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients. Most of the customers just aren't very bright. One of my brokers would even mark assignments with the code words DUMB CLIENT.  That meant to use simple English; nothing's worse than a client calling back to ask a broker — most of whom had no particular academic training — what certain words in the paper meant. One time a client actually asked to talk to me personally and lamented that he just didn't "know a lot about Plah-toe." Distance learning meant that he'd never heard anyone say the name.

I found the essay more heart-breaking than infuriating. It would be interesting to know what others think and feel.

Tags:
Posted in culture | Comments Off

Turnitin.com and Language

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Turnitin.com advertises that their service now checks papers in 30 different languages using the site global.turnitin.com. This new address, however, is unnecessary as the basic service that we subscribe to will also check any paper in a Western language for "originality."

To test this, Barbara sent me a paper that had already been turned in to one of her Spanish classes, and I submitted it again, as a student. What had been causing concern was that when a paper is submitted, all formatting and special characters are stripped from the paper before searching the internet and the database for comparisons. In Language classes, this strips all diacritical marks, and will occasionally leave behind random characters.

Minutes after submitting the paper, the Originality Report came back as expected - showing the paper to be a duplicate of one that had already been turned in at SI.

Quick submit

Clicking on the color-coded Originality score opens the paper for full viewing:

 Originality Report

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please post them below in the Comments (you may need to login first under the "Meta" tab on the right).

Tags:
Posted in faculty, tech | Comments Off