In response to Terry's note about CopyCatch: we find that it catches the
"copiers" quite well, even when they have changed a few references and
sex! It' particularly useful between year groups - 'mine got a good mark
last year so you put it in this year' type thing. However, we were
alarmed at first to find that students work was often over 50% similar.
Until, that is, we found that this was a lot to do with the references
and quotations used. If two students choose to right about subject A
then their reference list will be similar and they may use the same
definitions.
We designed our assignments to be plagiarism unfriendly. It's a
patchwork of papers drawn from group discussion a la Problem Based
Learning, a critique of a fellow student's work and a reflective essay.
They also work in supervised groups. We believed - naively as it turned
out - that this would make plagiarism almost impossible (prevention
rather than cure). So it was quite a shock the first time we found two
students from different groups to have exactly the same response to
their group and a fellow's work; and to have gained the same experience
throughout!
Food for thought?
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Plagiarism [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Terry
McAndrew
Sent: 15 July 2004 11:20
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Promoting best practice and plagiarism prevention.
Hi,
I am a bit concerned that pre-testing ones work for plagiarism with
turnitin is only loading the database for more false positives in the
future since each submission is cross checked with the others. I found
it frustrating to keep finding my test documents again and again. I have
since moved to using JISCPAS and used it for a practical where I asked
bioscience students to deliberately cheat - create an example of
plagiarised work, including lifting text from each other, so we could
see how these were picked up. I explained that this was only one of the
tools in our armoury. Most were significantly impressed.
This was done not in a threatening or accusative way. We were
illustrating the lengths that we are going to, to protect the academic
integrity of their efforts - what value has a good mark if it can be
easily overtaken or diluted by a cheat?
With my other hat on here in the LTSN centre for Bioscience, our
plagiarism SIG for Biosciences looked at many aspects of plagiarism and
one of the most common was collusion, not net-lifting. A tool which
could compare the semantics of the text and pull out para-phrasing had
been developed commercially and a free limited version was released for
HE. Bulk uploads of word files are supported. This is CopyCatch.
This is one of the most impressive bits of code (tiny 74k of java) I had
seen for a while and we thought it particularly useful.
See http://bio.ltsn.ac.uk/network/sigs/plagiarism/
Regards,
Terry McAndrew
C&IT Manager
LTSN Centre for Bioscience
Room 8.49n
Worsley Medical and Dental building
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
Tel: +44 (0) 113 343 3593
Fax: +44 (0) 113 343 5894
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://bio.ltsn.ac.uk/
This Subject Centre is now part of the Higher Education Academy
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