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Anti-Plagiarism Technology
Thwarting the Copycats
9/2/2008
With the pervasiveness of internet content, paper mill sites, and plain old student ingenuity (don't they have anything better to do?), academic plagiarism threatens to spiral out of control. Here's what you can do about it.
With over 1,200 undergrads
in a single introductory biology lab course, Professor Marvin O'Neal has neither the
time nor the resources to check the originality of every weekly report a student turns
in. O'Neal is course director in undergraduate biology at Stony Brook University, a
flagship campus of the State University of New York system. Scanning reports for
authenticity is no simple task-- his huge course is divided into 60 sections, each with
about 24 students and an instructor. All sections cover the same material weekly, so
all 1,200 students have the exact same assignment. With multiple instructors grading
papers, the challenge has been: How to prevent students from different sections, with
different instructors, from turning in the same report?
The outsized class that O'Neal describes isn't unique to Stony Brook-- and neither, of course, is the issue of student plagiarism. As any instructor knows, the easy availability of internet content has greatly increased student opportunities for work that is less than original. Today, the term plagiarism can range in meaning from using an unattributed phrase or sentence (accidentally or intentionally) to submitting entire purchased works as one's own. The profusion of online paper mill sites, which offer material that can be illicitly submitted as a student's work, have heightened what has been an ongoing battle since long before the internet. But while 25 years ago plagiarism might have meant two students sitting together copying each other's work or sharing notes from year to year, plagiarism today tends to make use of paper mill websites or sites such as Wikipedia, and it is greatly facilitated by the ease of finding specific information through search engines like Google.
Tools for Outsize Classes
TURNITIN'S DATABASES for comparing papers contain some 9 billion pages of internet content, and in addition to a growing store of textbooks and published material, 10,000 publications that aren't readily available in cyberspace.
Trying to fight fire with fire, increasing numbers of schools have turned to technology for help, creating what amounts to a boon for anti-plagiarism tool vendors. At Stony Brook, for instance, O'Neal is using Blackboard SafeAssign to monitor student submissions, a hosted service that Blackboard added to its course management suite last year. In May, the vendor said that SafeAssign had already been used to check the originality of over a million papers, online.
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