If I've understood Tabitha's message correctly, the new features will defeat the purpose of the macro scam, by searching for text which matches the putative substitute "real" character, not the spoofing version in the underlying (overlying?) document.
This makes my previous points about distinguishing *.rtf and *.doc formats redundant.
But I agree with David that stripping out the macros is in effect destroying evidence of possible intention, which would undermine the possibility of imposing appropriate penalties.
Of course, this wouldn't be an issue for institutions (like my own Faculty) which make students submit files to tutors via a VLE, for subsequent uploading to TII by the tutors.
Julian
Dr Julian Wells
Faculty web-page
http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/staff/cv.php?staffnum=287
Personal web-site
http://staffnet.kingston.ac.uk/~ku32530
Senior lecturer
School of Economics
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Kingston University
Penrhyn Road
Kingston-upon-Thames
KT1 2EE
-----Original Message-----
From: Plagiarism on behalf of David Pike
Sent: Thu 29/05/2008 23:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Non-standard characters to fool Turnitin?
Hi Tabitha,
Just a thought....
Is stripping the macros out a good move? Becuase this would certainly explain why the assignment I picked up had no macros in. It would be the only way to prove that something is wrong. Would it be possible to offer a 'macroised' version of the documents? (I'm of course aware this will make those who are security aware prick their ears up!).
It appears the mediacafe video has been in the wild since 21st May 2007 :-(
David
>>> Tabitha Edwards <[log in to unmask]> 05/29/08 7:28 PM >>>
Hello Everyone,
My name is Tabitha, I am the Product Manager for iParadigms, makers of
Turnitin and TurnitinUK. I'd like to chime in here to explain where the
special character replacement issue stands with Turnitin. We are aware that
special characters, like a Cyrillic "e", can be used to replace standard
English characters in students' papers. The service does not recognize the
special characters and will cause the special characters to show up as "?"s
in the Originality Report. The appearance of a great number of "?"s in an
Originality Report generally indicates that the student has mass-replaced a
standard character with a special character. At the moment the best way to
see if such a change has taken place is to look at the Originality Report.
We are currently working on a new resolution for this issue. This new
resolution will allow the service to replace the special character with the
corresponding standard English character for originality checking. The
special character will still appear in the Originality Report (no more
"?"s); however, the word it is in will have been matched against words
containing every character that looks like that character. This allows us to
show you matches to words with both the special character and the standard
character. This resolution is scheduled to launch during this Summer.
As far as using macros, we have seen the videos that explain how to "beat"
Turnitin using Word Macros. We currently strip macros from Microsoft Word
Documents for Word 2003 and below (this was also done for the security of
instructors downloading the files). When we strip a macros from a Word file,
whatever character the student originally had in the file will appear. For
instance, one of the videos recommends starting with a "~e" and replacing it
with a standard "e" using macros. When we strip the macros the "~e" will
appear in the paper. This means the "~e" will appear in the Originality
Report, GradeMark, and the file available for you to download from the service.
For Microsoft Word 2007, we don't accept macros-enabled (.docm) files (we do
accept the standard .docx files).
I hope this helps to alleviate some of your concerns.
Kind Regards,
Tabitha
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