Plagiarism and Collusion Damages Science

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Plagiarism and Collusion Damages Science
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Plagiarism/Collusion

• Some comments on plagiarism and how to avoid
  it/detect it
• Copied from the slides and teachings of Jude
  Carrol _at_ Oxford Brooks University
• Please visit http//www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocs
  d/2_learntch/plagiarism.html
• Louise A. Dennis http//www.cs.nott.ac.uk/lad/
• Check out her paper L. A. Dennis, Student
  attitudes to plagiarism and collusion within
  computer science, in A. P. Smith and F. Duggan
  (Eds) Plagiarism Prevention, Practice and
  Policy Conference 2004. Northumbria University
  Press, 2005. pp. 57-64.

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Submitting someone elses work as your own

• but what we mean by this?
• What do we mean by work
• Why is HE interested in work?
• What makes work your own?
• What must happen in order that work belongs to
  someone else?
• What does not belong to anyone belongs to
  everyone?

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• Submitting someone elses work as your own

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Two different perspectives

• Submitting someone elses work as your own work
• Creating a false assumption in an assessor by
  borrowing, without specific acknowledgement, from
  other published or unpublished work

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Lets Play Again ?
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An exercise in Collusion Detection

• Collusion continuum
• Imagine you have asked your students to write an
  individual report on one of three companies that
  you name. They can choose any of the three.
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• Now imagine that your students do the following
  and ask yourself when they have crossed the line
  between collaboration and collusion?
•    

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• Collusiometer
• To each of 1-16 give a mark between 1 and 16
• The lowest the mark the closer to collusion the
  act is
• The highest the mark the farther to collusion is
• We will at the end sum for each act all the marks
  and sort them from
• individual work (max value) to collusion (min
  value)
• The collusiometer

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Why Collusion is Relevant to us ?
Nature 439, 8 (5 January 2006)
Imagine the damage would Woo Suk Hwang had
colluded with other leading scientists?
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Plagiarism is a type of collusion where one of
the colluding agents is not aware she/he has been
co-opted in!So it is even worst!
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What the School says about plagiarism

• The school http//www.cs.nott.ac.uk/UG/plag.html
  
• Plagiarism
• This means copying work and pretending that it is
  yours.
• Plagiarism includes asking other people who are
  not on your
• course to do the work for you (whether payment is
  included
• or not) and then submitting the work as your own.
  
• Plagiarism is not allowed.
• The following actions are considered to be
  plagiarism
• copying paragraphs or programs from a textbook
• copying another persons work either with or
  without their knowledge
• working together in groups of two or more to
  produce a
• significant parts of a program, essay or other
  exercise and then
• each member of the group submitting a copy of
  this as their own work.
• You can stop other people from copying your work
  by checking that

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Is this plagiarism?From Louise A. Dennis notes
on plagiarism
Two students both get stuck at the same point in
a programming coursework the results of which
count towards their final module mark. They work
on this together and come up with a subroutine
that solves the problem. They cut and paste this
into both courseworks and carry on working
individually.
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Two students discuss an essay coursework
together, they share any references they have
found and agree on what they believe are the key
points in the essay.
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A non-native English speaker is writing an
essay. They have read a lot of articles which
make many good points they wish to include in the
essay. They take paragraphs from these sources,
place them in italics and put a reference by each
paragraph in the text and in a list at the end.
The finished result contains more text in italics
than it does in normal font.
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A student is completely stuck on a
programming coursework and is convinced they can
not make any more progress. They look in a
friends H drive and manage to find a version of
the coursework they can copy. The student then
modifies this copy, changing the variable names,
rewording all the comments and print statements
and switching round some of the code lines where
the order doesnt seem to make a difference. They
then submit this as their own.
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A student copies a paragraph from a textbook or
web page making small changes eg. replacing
words with synonyms. The source is not mentioned
anywhere in the essay.
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A student composes a paragraph by taking
short phrases of 10 to 15 words from a number of
sources and putting them together, adding words
of their own to make a coherent whole. Although
they list all the sources at the end of the
coursework, they do not mention them in the
paragraph concerned.
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student paraphrases a paragraph with
substantial changes in language, organisation and
the amount of detail used. The source material is
acknowledged in the text (eg. (Jones, 1999)) and
included in a list of references at the end of
the coursework
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Conclusions

• Hard to define and pinpoint
• Very pernicious to science reputation
• Be self-vigilant, its too easy to slip-into it
• Before submitting a paper do a google check
• From each section of you paper choose 1 random
  sentence from each paragraph
• Send it to google
• If there is a match then you might have
  involuntary plagiarise (hopefully your own past
  papers!)
• The school is investigating a systematic way of
  checking for plagiarism so beware!