Dear Gunner,
There are two main types.
One is where they have used online programs in dumb ways.
This leads to English that looks like it has been Google translated into French, then German and then Spanish and finally back to English. My uni calls this bad English, not fraud.
The second type is where they have gone over the muddle and normalised it somewhat. Some of the software will take you through the text line by line, offering variations as you go.
Because Turnitin is set up at my uni to allow multiple resubmission, students can then make further changes, unseen by me, that reduces the percentage to around 15 or less. Very few lectures look at 15%.
I am working on ways around this problem.
Even when the paragraph blocks are identical in conceptual content, Turnitin will not show up the similarity if just a few words are moved around.
What a waste of my highly trained mind to have to catch students doing this.
Keith
Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10
From: Gunnar Swanson<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, 5 March 2017 1:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Essays for sale
Keith,
> On Mar 4, 2017, at 8:42 PM, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> [snip]
> Students are using thesaurus software to scramble their plagiarism.
> My Asperger¹s brain picks up on this, but then the institution finds
> problems supporting such a forensic approach.
> Unless students confess, they are often getting away with fraud.
I’m curious how well thesaurus software works--I’m assuming this means software that takes a paragraph or more and paraphrases it. Does it produce English that would generally pass the Turing test? Maybe my (undergraduate graphic design) students are less linguistically sophisticated than others but I find that when they use a thesaurus to find new (single) words, they often don’t bother figuring out what the newly-discovered words actually mean. I can’t imagine that they’d be very good at correcting the Turing-negative parts of whatever such software would produce.
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