Hi Steven,
We've seen one assignment very similar to this before; every so often we
kept finding accented "a" characters. Our best guess was our student had
saved the document whilst using one of the language bar settings on his
PC. This is different to your case becuase everything had been changed
in the document we found.
Other than that...there was a video on youtube that showed how a macro
could be used to change every other word when a document opened (so the
tutor would download it and it would appear normal). Of course Turnitin
would not match anything becuase of the addition of excess characters in
the document. You may want to disable Macros in Word and download + open
the document. Check and see if there are macros.
Hmm...oddly the video has vanished from youtube...
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheating+turnitin has some links. Avoid
the media cafe one!
Regards,
David
Staff Development Officer e-Learning Technologies
University of Bedfordshire
>>> Steven Bentley <[log in to unmask]> 05/29/08 11:59 AM >>>
I have a piece of work from a student in which many of the letters have
been swapped from the normal version of the letter to one from a
different character set, which looks similar.
You can see the effect easily if you compare the result of typing an e
and doing alt-1077 (using your numeric keypad) - they look identical but
are different characters, which means that a word spelt th[alt-1077]
doesn't match "the" in sources Turnitin checks against.
In the example I've got, it's not every instance of these characters
which has been changed, on some occasions the word "there" has both
variants of the letter e. This makes me think it's not a simple find
and replace, but software which is only changing some of the characters
so it's a bit more subtle.
An example line from the work concerned (converted to HTML):
Thеre are large differenceѕ in both ѕpeed and
coѕtѕ between thе traffic modeѕ road and air.
Has anybody come across this? Or can anybody suggest a legitimate
reason why this might have happenned that isn't an attempt to circumvent
plagiarism detection?
Thanks
Steve
---
Steve Bentley
IT Support/Web Developer/Learning Technology Advisor
School of Applied Sciences, University of Huddersfield, HD1 3DH
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