The Diversity of Plagiarism

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The Diversity of Plagiarism
Fintan Culwin London South Bank
University fintan_at_lsbu.ac.uk Plagiarism
providing strategies to address the issues HEA
Engineering Subject Centre Sheffield 24 May 2006
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The Diversity of Plagiarism
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Educate Your Students Beware the Kent Defence
http//cise.lsbu.ac.uk/plagposter
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Make it Explicit!
sharing ideas mutual support e.g. study groups
Co-operation
Encouraged?
e.g. showing a design or essay structure plan
Collusion
Tolerated?
Do you know?
Where is the line?
More Importantly - do your students know?
e.g. copying from within or without the group
Copying
Forbidden?
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Educate not Instruct or Punish!
All first year computing students at LSBU are
required to submit a 1,000 essay on an
(individual) topic from the history of computing.
They are told to use the Web to research the
topic, but to write the essay in their own words.
The essays are subsequently subject to automated
non-originality analysis and a report produced.
This is then discussed in a non-threatening
educative manner with the students. This is
supplemented by a lecture on am, a site giving
examples a reminder in a core unit at the start
of the second year and another lecture at the
start of the final year project.
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Educate Yourselves
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The Future of Plagiarism?
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Game theory ?
Students cheat because the perceived chances of
being caught and the perceived punishment if
caught are less than than the perceived
benefit of cheating, at the time when the
cheating occurs.
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A diversity of responses
acculturalise all students to academic values
redesign assessments to make it more difficult
to cheat increase the chances of cheats being
caught ensure a punitive response when students
are caught publicise the consequences of
cheating establish an ethos of plagiarism
awareness do unto yourselves as you would do
unto others!!
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establish an ethos of plagiarism awareness
blue 03 red 04 green 05
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OrCheck
OriginalityChecker is an in-house, desktop,
single-document, free-of-charge, database
(Google) driven, text only, non-proprietary
tool.
Essentially, it provides some assistance with the
process of manually performing a Google driven
keyword search and (in particular) with
interpreting the extent and significance of any
matches in the documents returned.
In the final year project investigation it was
used to locate URLs to manually feed into the
JISC service.
It was also used in passive mode to prepare
evidential reports for the investigation phase.
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OrCheck in Operation 1
document loaded
concordance generated
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OrCheck in Operation 2
search in progress
hits obtained
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OrCheck in Operation 3
textual comparison
graphical representation
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PRAISE
Prioritised Ring to Assist In Similarity
Evaluations is an in-house, desktop,
intra-corporal, free-of-charge, stylistic, (text
only), non-proprietary tool.
It is used to detect and display the degree of
similarity between the documents in a corpus.
Although designed for text-only use it will
operate upon styled texts (though its behaviour
is somewhat unknown). It uses the words2 metric,
shown from Thomas Lancasters - thesis to be
efficient and effective. It is intended to
allow an OrCheck and/or VAST viewer to be spawned
from it for detailed investigation.
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PRAISE in Operation 1
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PRAISE in Operation 2
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PRAISE in Operation 3
The documents are arranged on the torc in gross
similarity sequence. Controls are provided to
vary the number of documents and the degree of
similarity shown. When one document is selected
all other documents linked to it, at or above the
similarity level are also shown. (From here an
OrCheck visualisation will be launched). When
two documents (i.e. one link) are selected
details of that degree of similarity are shown.
(From here a VAST visualisation will be
launched) An alternative tabular view of the
information also needs to be provided.
Extra-corporal Web sourced documents can be
included and are shown in a different colour. (An
OrCheck style capability to obtain such documents
needs to be included.)
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VAST
Visual Analysis of Similarity Tool is an
in-house, desktop, double-document,
free-of-charge, stylistic driven, text only,
non-proprietary tool. It provides a detailed
OrCheck like visualisation and investigation of a
pair of documents. VAST is more capable of fuzzy
matching than OrCheck and so is more capable of
detecting similarity beneath superficial
disguises. However it is less precise in its
highlighting and is unable to give a (precise)
quantitative value to the similarity. VAST can
also be used to track changes in the drafts of a
document.
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VAST in Operation
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VALT
Visual ALignment Tool is an in-house, desktop,
double-document, free-of-charge, stylistic
driven, text only, non-proprietary tool. It
aligns two documents vertically attempting to
maximise the amount of the two documents that can
be directly aligned. A PDF version of the
alignment can be produced for evidential
purposes. VAST can also be used to track changes
in the drafts of a document.
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VALT in Operation
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FreeStyler
FreeStyler is an in-house, desktop,
single-document, free-of-charge, stylistic, text
only, non-proprietary tool. It provides
rolling-average, interactive graphs of various
stylistic measurements. The intention is that if
there is more than one voice in a document, the
differences should become visible in the graphs.
(In practice this has not proved to be so
easy!). FreeStyler can also be used as a writing
tool (checking reading age across a document,
ensuring consistency of voice and spelling
conventions etc.).
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FreeStylerIII in Operation