Anti-Plagiarism Technology
Thwarting the Copycats
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.