Downloading
Detectives: Searching for On-Line Plagiarism
Robin
Satterwhite- Social Sciences Librarian – Tutt Library – Colorado College
Marla
Gerein – Social Sciences Academic Technology Specialist – Colorado College
Introduction
The use of the Internet as a research tool is now a common “given” in the academic work of our students and the demands for information placed on our libraries. But with the rise of high quality on-line resources and increased computer access comes the challenge of how to prevent and deal with new methods and sophisticated levels of plagiarism. The Internet now hosts thousands of sites offering essays, term papers and reports and other ways to “beat the system”. It also offers a plentitude of products and services meant to detect and nab those nasty plagiarists.
At
Colorado College, like most post-secondary institutions we suspect, the level of
awareness that our professors have of the good, the bad, and the ugly on the
Internet, in terms of academic research runs the full spectrum.
For example, one professor told us that he was certain no student could
ever use Internet sources to plagiarize an assignment, because his area of study
was too “obscure”, (he teaches African and South American studies).
To the other extreme, professors have approached our library staff,
wanting the library to purchase the latest plagiarism detection software or
service they’ve just heard about, convinced it will solve all their digital
woes.
In
an effort to understand the limits and abilities of plagiarism detection
software and on-line services, we decided to run an “experiment” in order to
be able to proactively respond to our faculty as to the effectiveness of such
products. This is the story
of how we became “downloading detectives” and our experiences in this
capacity thus far.
Our
experiment has had four objectives:
The
architecture of our experiment has been structured as follows:
Based
upon the results of running the pool of papers through our selected
anti-plagiarism products, services and technique, we have made some preliminary
assessments about the “cat and mouse” game of on-line plagiarism and its
detection. We have also applied our
findings to effective models for research based assignments and promoting
information literacy in our digital culture.
The
Literature Review
Being
somewhat honest and naive, the age-old conundrum of plagiarism was known to us,
but neither of us were prepared for the slew of on-line tools and tricks of the
trade that we found discussed on the literature we reviewed.
An article by Julie Ryan was particularly interesting, considering that
both her and her husband teach an introductory information security concepts
course for George Washington University.[1]
Ryan was rather shocked to find that in a class of 42 students, she found
7 to have plagiarized most if not all of their papers from an online source, and
4 others to have misrepresented their sources in footnotes.
The next year, she found the same percentage, one in six students to have
plagiarized as well. And this is
an information security concepts course!
Article
and article brought to the forefront strategies, sites and interesting anecdotes
of students in their bids to successfully plagiarize on-line sources.
Many of the articles provided strategies for professors to try to
identify plagiarized Internet material. But
very few of the articles discussed more than one or two examples of successful
strategies or offered products that really “got the job done” in a bid to
successfully nab a cheater every time. Did
such a product or service exist “out there”?
That is what we set out to determine.
Make
no mistake about it…plagiarizing papers with on-line source materials can be
tempting and down right amusing! In
the vast sea of on-line information, how possible would it really be for a
professor to nail down a mis-used source? Or
identify a bought or downloaded paper? How easy would it be for a student to get a complete paper?
Many
paper mill sites offer disclaimers that their products are to be used for
“research purposes only” and that plagiarism is a serious offense.
But then again, how valid can such admonishments be from sites called
“schoolsucks.com” or “The Evil House of Cheat”?
An interesting comparative look could be made between the “hacker”
mentality and on-line plagiarism.
Paper
mills make it incredibly convenient to cheat.
There are hundreds of sites that post papers that can be downloaded for
free. They make no claim to
quality, but the again, you get what you pay for!
It took us five minutes to find enough sites to choose five free papers
from, of various lengths and on topics.
Paper
mills that actually charge for papers claim that their papers are of a higher
quality, and usually reflect such claims in their price.
The cost for papers on these sites range from $9.95 for access to the
entire database for a year, to papers that cost upwards to $200 a piece.
We selected papers from a $9.95 all-you-can-cheat buffet site, a $90
paper, and three other papers in between that range.
All purchases required a credit card, sometimes with follow-up telephone
confirmation, and usually service with a smile. One site even had a representative contact us, claiming the
paper we chose was somewhat out-of-date and of a lesser quality, and wanted to
recommend a better selection! And the fee comes across so legitimately on your
credit card bill – one paper appeared on our American Express statement as,
“The Paper Store – Office Supplies, etc”.
Claims
or no, we found the papers from both the paid and the free sites to be of
terrible quality – in the bad, lower level highs school quality range, for the
most part. Bibliographies were
often lacking, or were of extremely low quality when provided.
If we were going to make recommendations to fledgling online plagiarists,
we would say “take your chances on the free papers”.
Our
“cut and paste” papers pulled from commonly accessed on-line sources: one
was a Brittanica on-line article, one an e-book excerpt from our Net Library
collection, and the others selected from on-line periodical indexes, such as ABI
Inform, Ebsco, and JSTOR. To round
out the group of papers, we used two essays that were submitted to faculty at
Colorado College and suspected of plagiarism, and excerpts from highly-graded
papers that were also submitted to the College.
We
were quite mystified by the claims made by both the free and at-cost
anti-plagiarism products and services we found on the Web.
Many claimed to search vast databases, and be able to return contextually
sophisticated and comprehensive results. We
very much doubted the ability of these products and services to “get the job
done”, when paper mill sites shift, change, add and appear everyday, with
databases of papers that range from the hundreds to the thousands.
And what of the fee-based paper sites?
Did the plagiarism detection companies pay for access to these thousands
of papers? Did they run constant
updated queries of new sites and new papers?
We didn’t think so, and ventured forth to find out.
All
the products and services are based on the same concept:
string searches of key phrases. The
key to success seems to be how and why each program selects certain phrases…is
it random? Is it predetermined? We
would like to do more research yet on how these programs are actually designed,
and will do so as we continue our “experiment”. Below are the programs and services, both free and paid for
that we have used:
A “thorough” program, but very slow. You submit an entire paper, and must be connected to the Internet during the processing. Our computer locked up once, and we hesitated to "multi-task" until EVE2 was through processing. It took several
hours
to process 13 papers. (we recommend
starting the process before you leave for the weekend!)
A class of 25 students and 10-page papers would easily take 24 hours.
Positive
aspects of the program:
o
Easy to
transfer files.
o
A window
opens and directs you to select the files off of your computer or a disk that
you want to check.
o
You get
to submit entire document, not a portion.
o
Gives
results in percentages.
o
Though if
no plagiarism was detected, no report is issued.
Very
ineffective. It uses a meta
search engine to search the web. Only accepts 100 words...or 1000 characters as
submitted material to test for plagiarism, (about 1 paragraph).
Randomly picks out phrases to search. Sometimes the phrase is 4
sentences. Other times two or three
words. One time it chose the
numeral "6" for us! When we illuminated all of the common phrase
detections that this program marked...the word "woman" ,
"examples are", etc.,
then all of the submitted texts passed.
The selection process is far too random.
The text sample is not large enough.
None of the known cases of plagiarism were detected by this program!!! The price is right for this one - free.
Paperbin
(Integriguard paid version)
A
little bit better than the free version, but not by much.
Still basically uses the all-the-web meta search engine. However, it does look at the entire document instead of
100 words. Once again, the
randomly selected phrases used to check for plagiarism were very poor choices -
common phrases, single words - nothing that was unique to that subject matter.
Results were emailed to the instructor.
A document "failed" if one of the 5 random searches brought up
a possible web site. Only three papers actually failed. 2 other papers were reported "failed", but after
checking the website that was marked as having similar text,
we changed the result to pass.
Sometimes, web sites that were indicated in the results had nothing to do
with the topic! When using the
"find" feature in our browser to search the reported sites we often
couldn't locate any of the highlighted words!
We wouldn't recommend this program.
Turn-it-in
(plagiarism.org)
This
was our favorite thus far, if we had to recommend one...but we’re still not
sold on this method. It’s easy to have students submit their text on the
specified website and there is no software to download.
The student submits their entire paper, not just a portion of it, and the
submission is secure. Very few irrelevant error detections were returned and
their website is well-designed. Turn-it-in
also provides a summary page and then details for each paper that was submitted.
Color-coded results display text highlighted in the same color as the web
site where matches were found. Levels
of plagiarism reported…no one simply “fails” or “passes”.
This software accurately detected the most papers, but still not all
paperswere detected – only 5 out of 8 papers were successfully detected. However, Turn-it-in did detect e-book and two of the
articles. When we checked the
links, the Project Muse article was posted on a faculty class website.
The Ebsco article was listed as coming from a database that was not
available to me. The one downside
to this service is that it can be slow - results sometimes take as long as 24
hours
The
whole process using this software/service was far too intrusive.
It reminded us of taking a lie detector test before you are hired for
employment - you have to prove your innocence.
Basically, the test for plagiarism in this case works something like
this: the student submits their
paper, and then is “tested” on their writing – GLATT takes random portions
of the submitted paper, and asks the student to “fill in the blanks” where
it has removed words and phrases. The underlying premise is that if you wrote the words, you
should be able to remember them. This
form of testing gave us chills. WE
don't think the campus culture of Colorado College would accept a form of
plagiarism detection like this.
This
program is designed for larger files than a student essay.
First, you need to have
identified
the possible source that was plagiarized for the paper,
then you can download
that
text together with the student paper in question. The software program will compare the two files.
WORDCheck is designed for authors who want to protect their literary
works - you keep your texts in a file and can download texts and compare sources
that might have plagiarized/stolen their
intellectual property. Not an
effective tool for student plagiarism detection.
In
addition to, or as a substitute for paid for programs and services, many of the
sources in our literature review recommended using certain search engine
techniques to catch plagiarists red-handed.
We entered three key phrases from each paper to both Altavista and
Metacrawler and looked at the first two pages of results to see if the
plagiarized words sent cyber alarm bells ringing! All together, these search engines found only 3 of the
papers. Most times, the search was
so narrow that I only had a page of results or no results. This blows apart the
hypothesis promoted by many authors on student plagiarism that search engines
can find many cases of plagiarism.
We
were, although not surprisingly, not very impressed with the results provided by
both the paid and free plagiarism detection services and software.
Using search engines returned even more dismal results.
No one source caught all the papers. In fact, the rate of detection
across the line was dismal, with a high of 56% to a whopping low of a 0%
detection rate. We were
disappointed in the seemingly random nature of the passage checking in some of
the programs/services – a clear correlation is observable, we find, between
poorly selected passages and the low rate of detection.
Quotations, even with footnotes, seem to cause a real “glitch” in
these programs, often “detected” as possible points of plagiarism.
In
terms of the papers themselves, we were surprised to observe that a few of the
bought papers were indeed detected, (perhaps they had become available, thanks
to some “generous” soul on a free site as well). But then again, not one program detect them all, not did each
of the programs/services detect the same paper.
It was also interesting to note that the free and purchased papers were
detected at the same random rate. No one product/service or technique caught
only paid or free papers. Only one
software program detected the e-book paper, and much to our chagrin, no
program or service caught the Brittanica article! And lastly, all the real Colorado College papers avoided any
detection – including those suspected of plagiarism.
Based
on our findings this far, we are fairly confident in our ability to relate to
our faculty that available detection software and services as they currently
exist are not effective tools with which to identify on-line plagiarism.
They are not reliable, nor sophisticated enough to warrant the investment
of college funds. Not only are they ineffective, but some of the
products/services promote a real lack of trust and resentment between professor
and student that, especially given their lack of success, makes such a purchase
undesirable. If anything, faculty
can take consolation in the fact that from our observations, we doubt that any
plagiarist is going to “get away” with submitting a canned paper and
receiving an “A” grade.
As
with many of the sources we consulted in our literature review, we recommend
instead spending time and energy on proactively avoiding plagiarism in the first
place, rather than trying to detect it after the fact.
We recommend to our factory that they
anticipate and proactively attempt to deter the different “breeds” of
cheaters.
Lisa
Renard, in her article, “Cut and Paste 101: Plagiarism and the Net”[2]
has identified three types of student cheaters: the unintentional cheater, the
sneaky cheater, and the all-or-nothing cheater. The unintentional cheater make up a large portion of the
cyber-plagiarists professors encounter – they have never learned to properly
document their sources, and very much do not consider the Internet as a
“source” in that regard. The
sneaky cheater is the student that knows that they’re cheating and know the
tactics of how to get away with it. As
they create their finely-crafted and highly-plagiarized essay, they change words
or sentences, cut and paste blocks of text from a variety of sources, and even
create bibliographic entries. The
fact that they could have easily written a legitimate paper for the amount of
effort they’ve expended to cheat successfully doesn’t seem to phase them.
And lastly, the all-or-nothing cheater is the lazy and/or last-minute,
panic driven student plagiarist who downloads and submits a paper they’ve
bought or found on the Internet in its entirety.
The
first step in deterring on-line plagiarism is education and perhaps a
“declaration of intent”. We
refer to this declaration as the “You should know that I know that you know
how to plagiarize on-line” statement. When
faculty are introducing a research paper assignment to a class, there should be
a discussion around proper documentation of on-line sources and the fact that,
as a professor, they are aware of on-line paper mills, and other such sources
for plagiarism. Perhaps forewarning
could also be given to students that on-line plagiarism will be looked for.
In addition to such a declaration, essay assignment and topics need to be
given that provide specific context and require individual thought, analysis and
perhaps reflection on unique personal or context-specific experience.
Our
adventures as “downloading detectives” will continue this year, evaluating
more programs, assessing their methods and architectures, and testing more
papers. We will also be doing more
interviews, panel discussions and forums to assess the “human” side of the
cat-and-mouse game of detecting on-line plagiarism. At this point in the venture, however, it seems the old adage
of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, still holds true in
terms of on-line programs and services to sniff out cyber-cheaters.
We will keep you posted as to our future work via our website at:
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