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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. Paraphrasing (as opposed to digesting then explaining an argument) is often suggested as a method of avoiding plagiarism. Since plagiarism is not the copying of someone’s words but the taking of credit for others’ work, paraphrasing without attribution is still plagiarism. Paraphrasing (particularly the sort of crude paraphrasing that Rebecca Moore Howard calls “patch writing” that is akin to what I assume thesaurus software would produce) represents the writer not having fully understood the subject--a sign of the writer’s not having digested the material he is writing about. It strikes me that an educational failure should be of more concern than presumptive fraud. Especially when that “fraud” may be the first step toward actual understanding. (The above was written before I launch into reading the first drafts of my design theory students’ papers. I’ll let you know if that experience changes my thoughts.) Gunnar Gunnar Swanson East Carolina University graphic design program http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm [log in to unmask] Gunnar Swanson Design Office 1901 East 6th Street Greenville NC 27858 USA http://www.gunnarswanson.com [log in to unmask] +1 252 258-7006 ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------