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Academics use technology to combat plagiarism

Donald MacLeod

Plagiarism via the Internet is a growing problem - but academics are fighting back with their own technology.

PERHAPS ONLY a few academics have heard of "the Oracle." They may well have marked his (or possibly, her) essays and assignments, however.

Operating via Internet sites, the Oracle is a symptom of the increasing professionalism of student plagiarism. "It's a little cottage industry," says Robert Clarke, lecturer in the department of computing at the University of Central England (UCE), U.K.

A major conference on plagiarism in the U.K. next week will hear about an investigation by Mr. Clarke and his colleague Thomas Lancaster into the world of contract plagiarism. They monitored a legitimate website on which small companies advertise for software to be written but which found 12 per cent of its business was students asking for bids to write their assignments.

They discovered an international trade through which U.K. students, for example, could get computer assignments written by students or graduates in India or eastern Europe. Rates there are as low as $10 or $15 to, say, write a piece of computer code for a student struggling to keep up with the work, panicking on a deadline or simply lazy.

Over the course of a year, the UCE lecturers found the average student on the site was posting four to seven assignments to be done by someone else — in other words, says Mr. Clarke, they were repeat offenders, apparently getting good results and getting away with it. They also discovered "subcontractors" offering between 50 and 100 assignments (and in one case more than 200) for bids and acting as middlemen between cheating students and the writers.

Mr. Clarke was tipped off about the Rentacoder website when one of his assignments appeared on it.

Part of his department's anti-plagiarism policy relies on technology. The Internet has made lifting material easy, but software such as Turnitin, used by the universities' plagiarism advisory service (Jisc-PAS), makes it possible for a lecturer to compare an assignment against billions of published papers and students' essays to spot suspicious similarities. Turnitin can also provide proof if it comes to disciplining a student.

The software makes it possible for Mr. Clarke to scan all programming assignments or final dissertations — previously impossibly laborious — and he makes sure students are aware this is done. (It does not take academic studies to show that cheating is more common where students perceive the risk of detection is low.)

But another line of defence is a return to the old-fashioned viva voce (oral) exam in which a student has to discuss his or her work. "We don't interrogate them about cheating but it's an opportunity to show they have got the depth of understanding about what they are doing. It has an educational value but it also detects students who haven't understood the work and have copied it," says Mr. Clarke.

There is a growing recognition that plagiarism is partly the fault of universities failing to explain the rules of the game to students, who are used to cutting and pasting material from the Internet at school.

Dame Ruth Deech, the independent adjudicator for higher education, will tell next week's conference, to be held in Gateshead, England, that institutions must be upfront about plagiarism and then make sure their procedures are applied consistently. Some universities take a more draconian line than others, but providing they have promulgated the rules and followed them consistently, the office of the independent adjudicator (OIA) would uphold such decisions, she says. Less than 3 per cent of her cases (about 15 a year) are appeals about plagiarism and she says students tend to complain that the penalty is too harsh or that others got away with the same behaviour, rather than denying it altogether.

Sally Brown, in charge of assessment, learning and teaching at Leeds Metropolitan University, England, says universities should aim to "design plagiarism out of the student experience." Assignments in which students have to reflect on their own progress, or draw on personal experience, are much more difficult to plagiarise, although she admits they are more work-intensive for academic staff.

But in a robust counterblast to the "plagiarism police," Peter Levin, of the London School of Economics, says the problem is that students are not being taught how to write essays and assignments. "More fundamentally, the present role of the plagiarism police in promulgating the Turnitin culture, in which ideas and writings are treated as commodities, needs to be challenged," he says in a paper — which he states must not be used by the Turnitin database for commercial purposes. His proposal is to publish all student writings that gain a pass grade on the web under a Creative Commons licence. Students' understanding of a topic would be tested by asking them to synthesise a unique handful of these essays into an essay of their own.

Mr. Levin says: "Learning would be — as it should — a matter of gaining, assimilating and building on knowledge and ideas from any source. Teachers could go back to teaching. And essay sellers and the plagiarism police would go out of business." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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