What's all this about plagiarism and how can technology help?

Instructors who assign writing projects occasionally find themselves uncomfortably suspicious of the originality of student work, and, having heard that the Internet is a rich source of plagiarized material, wonder how to search for a possible source of that work.  Many Internet sites do indeed provide self-published commentary and fiction, many provide documents as a public service by government agencies, and some have been set up to sell papers and essays outright (www.duenow.com). Sound pedagogical practices combined, when necessary, with the use of plagiarism detection tools can help instructors curtail most instances of plagiarism in the classroom.

Avoiding plagiarism in your classroom

The staff of the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning does not, in general, recommend the use of software to detect plagiarism, but rather recommends that students be given developmental assignments, turning in outlines, prospectuses or paper proposals, drafts, progress reports, and bibliographies, for example, both to discourage plagiarism and to encourage good research and revision. All of these developmental elements can be attached to final assignments at the time of submission. The Council of Writing Program Administrators explains this issue in a position statement (http://wpacouncil.org/positions/WPAplagiarism.pdf) that makes sense to us.

Using technology to detect plagiarism

We are investigating purpose-built software to assess both its benefits in general and the features of specific products.  For the time being, we recommend

• Your own instincts and experience, as the detector of a problem.  As for the source of the material, make educated guesses about online databases of articles and books in your own discipline that your students might have copied.
• A talk with the student, as the only dependable way to find out what happened and decide what to do.
• Search engines such as Google and AltaVista, in hopes of finding a clearly copied source on the Web.  We also see a couple of free products that hold promise:
    SeeSources:  Paste text into the window at www.seesources.com.  Very easy and simple web service; reveals discovered sources immediately.  German developer.
    DocCop:  Sign up for the service at www.doccop.com.  Click on link in acknowledgement message, paste text, results e-mailed.  All substrings are subject of search and shown individually in results; 500-word limit.  No source given, but a click on the string results link will produce them.

Note that in our internal tests, all with copying from Internet sources, Google search performed as well as anything else, even on variations of the text. 

Any mechanical text search is a simple tool only and should play a minor part in assessment. We maintain that both positive matches and negative results should lead to the same step - a conversation with the student about both the subject matter and the writing proces - and that this conversation is the only reliable indicator of what's going on, anyway.   

Last update: 23 Sept, 2011; mvbw