ECEIA25, Day 4

 Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 - Day 4

ECEIA25, Day 3

 Day 1 - Day 2  - Day 3 - Day 4

ECEIA25, Day 2

 Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 - Day 4

ECEIA 2025, Day 1

 Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 - Day 4

ECAIP 2022, Day 3

And now to conclude the conference! Unfortunately, I had THREE things booked for today, the conference and two others. Luckily, a friend took over one and I was able to do one via Zoom (having to get up early, as the 8:30 meeting started at 7:30 local time). I was able to use the internet at the Porto university, and then join up with the conference a little later.

Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3

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I missed the keynote by Elisabeth Bik, "The Dark Side of Science: Misconduct in Biomedical Research". I've heard her a number of times, her talks are always fascinating (and scary when you see how much research misconduct she is uncovering - imagine how much more is out there that she does not see.

The next talk I attended was by Thomas Lancaster on "Artificial Intelligence Led Threats To Academic Integrity." He casually demonstrated text generators, even a scientific literature review generator and an image and slide generator. With all of this out there (and used and the papers accepted by predatory publishers) we need to see that there is a big threat to scientific integrity out there for which we have absolutely no idea what to do about it.

Suraj Ajit (University of Northhampton) was to be speaking on "A rule-based decision support system for detecting, reporting, and substantiating contract cheating within assignments in computing courses in UK Higher Education" with an emphasis on computer science assignments. However, he used most of his time to tell us about the processes at his university for dealing with academic misconduct. At an academic integrity conference (as opposed to an introductory course for teacher) one can assume that people know about this. So he didn't have time to actually speak about his work, other than flashing a few decision tables that I didn't have time to read. He has unfortunately not posted his slides on the Sched site for the conference, so I was unable to read them later. 

Rafael Ball (Director of the ETH Library and Collections) then spoke on "Awareness Mentality and Strategic Behaviour in Scientific Publishing and Dissemination." He bemoaned a percieved shift in academic behavior from "being good" to "looking good" in bibliometrics and altmetrics. The awareness mentality deals with the strategic behavior of scientists and publishers: Scientists focus on career building, awarding, funding, while publishers focus on competition, having high rejection rates, and of course high spectacularity. He has noted that more and more article titles are ending with a question mark :) External goals are pre-empting scientific goals. He asks if publishing a translation of a paper is self-plagiarism, or if publishing with a slight shift in focus is an unnecessary second publication? 

Beatriz Antonieta Moya and Alex Paquette (University of Calgary) spoke about "Graduate students' reflections as partners of academic integrity advocacy during Covid-19" (Slides). In the past, grad students were not part of the Academic Integrity Week, but their mentor Sarah Elaine Eaton got them interested. They have a number of things they started like academic integrity trivia quizzes each day on Instagram or live session AMA with Sarah. 

Kelley Packalen (Queen's University) spoke on "What’s the Harm? The Professor Will Never Know: Understanding How Students Justify Participating in the “Grey Areas” of Academic Integrity." She and Kate Rowbotham looked at three research questions:

1. Under which scenarios do students determine it is permissible to engage in specific trivial and common violations of academic integrity? 
2. Is there a slippery slope effect as related to violations of academic integrity? 
3. What explanations do students use to justify violating academic integrity in general?
   

They determined that there is a slippery slope effect, and deduce the following practical implications that are similar to what is used to discourage students from binge drinking:

1. Share your thinking with students.
2. Debunk myths that everyone is cheating.
3. Reframe the choice as a moral decision instead of a business decision.

Erja Moore closed the session with "Internationalisation of higher education in Finland – A challenge for integrity in academic writing at Master’s level." She chose 28 Finnish Master's theses in English, 1 % of the 2020 Master's theses and 15 % of the master's theses in 2020 and gave them a close read. They varied in length from 23-101 pages, the reference lists were between 2 and 11 pages. She found a lot of problems in the theses: no written methodology, no in-text references, pseudoreferences, invented sources, inappropriate sources, etc. 

The conference closed with a keynote by Teddi Fishman "How we Succeed? Goals, Metrics, and Successes for Academic Integrity Initiatives in a Post-Covid, "PostTruth" World." In order to have some fun, Sonja Bjelobaba inserted random slides into her slide deck. Teddi asked us how we define "success" and in particular if our methods are valid, reliable, attainable and useful. We have to conclude that we are using data that is deeply flawed. We don't know how many students are cheating, we only know what we catch! We are in the post-truth era already (nicely illustrated with a a shop selling "Genuine Fake Watches). She introduced us to the "Overton Window", the idea that leaders are limited to those possibilities that already enjoy popular support. In effect, we have moved from stocks and pillories through shunning and public flogging to restorative justice in many areas. In academic integrity we are stuck in point penalties, revocation of degrees, loss of position or prestege, or demotion. Restorative justice is not quite inside the window yet. A random slide of Teddi in a Flying Spaghetti Monster costume got us off topic a bit, but she steered us back to some food for thought:

• To what extent have we shown sufficient transparency and accountabilitiy in our research practices so that the public can have faith in our outputs?
• Students who learn about knowledge production in concert with integrity become researchers with greater appreciation for integrity, who become supervisors of integrity.
• How do we bring about institutional as well as societal change? From the ground up!   

And then we had the closing ceremony! A large group of (male) medical students in traditional Porto garb and traditional instruments serenaded us and Laura Ribeiro, the organizer of the conference, including some spectacular gymnastics:

The next conference will be in June 2023 in Derby, UK, organized by Shiva Sivasubramaniam under the motto "Reflecting the Past for Reforming the Future".

ECAIP2022, Day 2

Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3

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And on to the second day of the conference!

The day began with a keynote speech by Ana Marušić, "Challenges in publishing ethics and integrity" Ana is a professor at the University of Split School of Medicine, Croatia,
Co-editor-in-chief, Journal of Global Health, a COPE council member, and President of The Embassy of Good Science Foundation. Coming from the standpoint of a journal editor she discussed research and publishing ethics, noting that there is a spectrum, from honest error over poor reporting to outright fraud (detrimental research practices). She first ran us through the history of journals, from the first journal, Journal des sçavans in 1665. She noted that the concept of peer review didn't appear until the middle of the 18th century, and Nature didn't even start until the 1950s! She had a good SWOT analysis of the challenges that editors face:

The main challenges of today are: dealing with image manipulations, correcting articles with honest errors, sorting out pre-prints, and trying to avoid paper mills and predatory publishers. 

Her summary is: Quality assurance in editing is the key to responsible publishing!

I then attended the workshop on "Coming Clean – Addressing the Issues Where a Student Self Declares Contract Cheating" with Thomas Lancaster, Michael Draper, Sandie Dann, Robin Crockett, and Irene Glendinning. I liked that they explicitly asked for consent to record the session, as they want to have input from the audience. Contract cheating represents choosing the wrong path - what if a student wants to come clean? The information that we provide to students should highlight and detail the whistleblowing processes and the support that is available to them, should they wish to admit to having cheated using contract cheating. Some cheating companies attemt to blackmail the students, say that they will tell the university if they don't pay more for the services used. There was a good discussion about the appropriate level of penalty that should be assessed in this situation. Teddi Fishman made it clear that there should be a path towards amnesty, with a focus on retributive or restorative justice. Others felt that there should be no credit given for contract cheating. Mike Reddy spoke about the 4 Cs: Conscious copying of content/concepts for credit. If they do not submit, it is not a crime. The lack of any one of the Cs is just poor academic practice, he thinks. 

Then we had a plenary session with a panel discussion (sponsored by Turnitin) moderated by Sonja Bjelobaba:

• Andreas Ohlson (Turnitin, former head of Urkund and Ouriginal, from Sweden)
• Tomáš Foltýnek (Researcher, ENAI president), from Brünn, in the Czech Republic 
• Martine Peters (Prevention researcher, professor), from Québec, Canada
  
• Katrīna Sproģe (European students union), from Latvia
  

KS noted that not all students have access to Turnitin. I realize that students want this, because they are afraid of plagiarizing by "mistake", but this won't help. They will rewrite to the number the software spits out (and really, really needs to lose!), but their writing won't be better. She also noted that students often translate texts they find online, and indeed, our 2020 test showed, that translation is in general not found by such systems.

TF (who let the 2020 test effort mentioned above) noted that even German to English cases are being found, so it is not just non-English languages that are being used. He criticized the interface that spits out a number that people take to be the decision. He also noted that with Turnitin buying up/out all the good competition, we are losing the competition. Each system finds different plagiarism, so it was better when we had more choice.

AO asked where the market will be in 5-10 years. He feels the consolidation is important, as it is easier to try new things if you are part of a larger company. The company has lots of discussions and research going on, in particular about how to use text-matching software in education? [The Times Higher Education reported on his comments in detail.]

MP suggested using the tool with the student in front of the student.

TF noted that so many universities have policies that are quite different, and many use the number reported by Turitin as a discriminator. There can be many reasons why there is a lot of text match (for example, the student submitted text earlier), there are tables, illustrations, etc. Not every plagiarism is detectable as a text match. He noted that paraphrasing tools are getting better and better, how do we deal with this?

AO admits that if you look at a single document, it is hard to do. But he notes that Turnitin are looking at the issue. One key is that we could compare with the same student's work over time. So if universities use our solution for everything a student does, they can see when the style changes. [But we WANT the students to change their writing style to become more academic in their writing! -- dww]

MP notes that we often don't even bother teaching referencing at universities, we focus just on the number.

KS wants the playing field to be more level. Students need an understanding of what the teachers expect and the teachers must understand what the students know. Who is the person you are teaching? Why are you teaching this material?

Thomas Lancaster from the audience asked "What answers are most different to the ones being given 10 years ago?"

MP: We as educators did not reflect as much on our role in plagiarism detection and prevention. We just blamed students. Now we look more at our role, it is a rude awakening.

KS: I wasn't a student 10 years ago :)  but we are involved in the discussion now.

TF: There has been a huge shift from the technological point of view to pedagogical approaches. From "What do we do when we discover plagiarism?"  to how to prevent plagiarism.

AO: Percentages :)

And then we had to hurry to the hotel to drop our stuff, and we were off for a bus tour of the city, a port wine tasting, and dinner. Tomáš and Dita had this nice picture of Elisabeth Bik and myself standing with them taken while we were waiting.

ICAI 2022

I was going to be exceedingly lazy and not blog about the ICAI 2022 (which is celebrating its 30th year of existence!), but  then I decided that I wanted to rant about one of the talks, so I will try and pull together something on the other talks that I have visited. The conference is being offered online only. It is excellent that the Zoom room chats are left open—we have had some great discussions in parallel with the talks. It will be difficult when we go back to in-person talks to shut up during the talks :) Unfortunately, they are using waiting rooms and this causes quite a number of problems: extra work for the session chairs letting people in, and not letting us speak to each other before the talk begins. For one session the room didn't get opened until a good 6 minutes after it was to start, that was a bit unfortunate. But on the whole, people have got the hang of how to run an online conference, which is great!

I asked an organizer, Camilla J. Roberts, about the numbers. There were 790 registrations (!) from 209 universities in 18 countries: US, Canada, Chile, Australia, UK, Ireland, Germany, UAE, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, Jamaica, Japan, Taiwan, India, South Africa, Columbia, and Egypt! I haven't seen anyone else from Germany here, though. 

Day 1, March 8, 2022

It is International Women's Day and a holiday in Berlin, and there is a horrible war going on in the Ukraine. The latter makes it hard to concentrate, to get into the groove of academic integrity discussions. But there are so many great people here and fantastic discussions going on.

• The opening was about the past of ICAI (and the next days will be present and future). Tricia Bertram Gallant put together a document about the history:  “It Takes a Village”: The Origins of the International Center for Academic Integrity. Well worth a read!
• Thomas Lancaster and Prakhar Nagpal spoke about "Are Students Using Homework Help Sites to Breach Academic Integrity?". They scraped 46 million questions asked at the Chegg web site and metadata such as date and time of the question. They wanted to see if they were able to verify a statement that is often heard from such sites: They are there for the 3 am questions students have. From the data that they gleaned, however, it was obvious that the questions were being asked Monday through Thursday during normal working hours in the UK. More were also seen in April and December, typical exam times. The also saw a two-fold jump in the number of questions asked after Covid closed the universities than in the year before. 
• A panel discussion that surprised me was the one on "Real Life with Academic Integrity Case Management Databases" (the conference web app is a real pain, it won't let me copy the names of the people presenting, so apologies if I misspell your names). Tricia Bertram Gallant moderated presentations from Camilla J. Roberts, Emily C. Perkins, and Christina McGilvray Lane who each use a different computer system for handling academic integrity violation cases. There is not only specialized software for that, there are multiple systems??? We don't even have clear processes at universites in Germany and in the US they not only have people who have jobs dealing with such cases (and working on prevention), but there is a choice of software? And honestly, it makes sense to have a well-formulated email that gets sent to everyone and a good record of all of the documentation sent in. I didn't think to ask how they deal with documenting things like 3D designs. The systems are Macient, Guardian, and Advocate and I forgot to note down which one was used where, sorry. 
• Blaire Wilson and Christian Moriarty (not that one) spoke about "Writing Academic Integrity Policy: How Justice and Consistency Collide". They have an open-access publication available (Justice and Consistency in Academic Integrity: Philosophical and Practical Considerations in Policy Making) that deals with, among other questions, restorative justice. It really got me thinking about why we punish certain behaviors and in particular, how we deal with mitigating circumstances. It seems everyone has a specific reason for why they did something, and not all of these reasons can be codified in law. So making things consitent can cause unjustness, and making things just keep them from being consistent.

Day 2, March 9, 2022

• I attended the Canadian Regional Consortium before the conference started. As a Canadian I am interested in what is happening at the various universities. It turned out to be a very wise move, as I got to hear the keynote by Cory Scurr, the Academic Integrity Coordinator at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario [boy, do those names ring a bell! Cousins of my Mom lived in Kitchener]. Cory has developed a Micro-Credential for instructors about academic integrity. They are 6 units of about 6 hours each, 1 hour synchronous discussion and 5 hours of reading/watching videos. The topics were just right for getting deeper into the topic of academic integrity. Half-jokingly someone asked if he would do a train-the-trainer course and start a franchise of the course. I'd sign up in a minute for that and translate the course into German, it is just what is necessary to get instructors aware of problems and solutions!
  
• Today the conference opened with ICAI present, or rather, since the move from Clemson University to a non-profit organization. It seemed to me that there was a bit of walking on eggshells going on, not sure what exactly happened. 
• Mary Davis spoke about "Promoting Inclusive Practice in Academic Integrity". She analyzed many guidance and process documents from UK universities that are used in academic integrity violation cases. The literature has identifed a number of issues:
  
• the continued over-representation of students from certain ethnic groups, including international students, in academic conduct investigations (Gray, 2020; Pecorari, 2016); 
• the opinion of some staff that plagiarism is an international students’ problem (Mott-Smith, Tomaš and Kostka, 2017); 
• the difficulties some student groups experience with understanding academic conduct regulations and good academic practice (Morris, 2018; Tauginiené et al., 2019);
• academic literacy teaching being available to some students and not others (Wingate, 2015). 
• Gray, D. (2020). Closing the black attainment gap on access – Project review 2018-2020. Open University. Available at: http://www.open.ac.uk/about/wideningparticipation/site/www.open.ac.uk.about.wideningparticipation/files/files/BAME-Evidence-Base.docx
  
• Morris, E. (2018). Academic integrity matters: five considerations for addressing contract cheating. International Journal of Educational Integrity, 14(15) Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0038-5
• Mott-Smith, J., Tomaš, Z. and Kostka, I. (2017). Teaching effective source use. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Pecorari, D. (2016). Plagiarism, international students and the second-language writer. In T. Bretag (Ed.) Handbook of Academic Integrity, pp.537-550. Singapore: Springer.
• Tauginiené, L., Gaižauskaité, I., Razi, S., Glendinning, I., Sivasubramaniam, S., Marino, F., Cosentino, M., Anohina-Naumeca, A. and Kravjar, J. (2019). Enhancing the taxonomies relating to academic integrity and misconduct. Journal of Academic Ethics, pp.1-17, Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-019-09342-4
• Wingate, U. (2015). Academic literacy and student diversity: the case for inclusive practice. Bristol: Multilingual Matters
• I included all the literature here, because this is an important topic. Mary looked for problems with respect to these issues and has formulated recommendations for inclusive academic integrity, which are to be published soon.
  
• Sarah Elaine Eaton chaired a panel on "Reconceptualizing Contract Cheating as Part of the Stress Process Model". This was a presentation of sociologists talking about how we process stress and how contract cheating can be seen as a method of alleviating stress. It made me think about all the stress that we produce in education for our students and for us. What can we do to reduce this stress that doesn't result in cheating?
• Leeanne Morrow and Lee-Ann Penaluna from the University of Calgary presented on "Expanding into the digital: supporting academic integrity using artificial intelligence". I was especially interested to see what type of artificial intelligence they would be using. It turns out, they purchased a bot that jumps at everyone who surfs to their pages at the library and asks if you need help. I personally hate these pesky things, but whatever. They also have a live chat during office hours, so a real human being can answer student questions.
  One thing I must make clear: A chatbot is NOT in any way, shape, or form "artificial intelligence" (as I call it, "magic fairy dust"). It is an algorithm that I have my first-semester programming students program to show them that what we percieve of as being "intelligence" is merely a very simple algorithm. I also want to kindly request that people not anthropomorphisize computers! They do not have a "brain". You do not "feed" them. They don't "answer". They have storage, receive input, and produce output.
  The authors of this research accessed a large amount of questions that students had asked both in live chat and in bot chat and analyzed it. They looked for key words that they felt were related to academic integrity and had a look at how often typical questions were asked and what the bot answered. The bot upon first install traverses their site to parse through the texts that are offered. After looking at the answers given for specific questions, they fine-tuned the system by editing the bot output for certain keywords.
  What really concerned me about this research was that, although it was about academic integrity, there appeared to be no informed consent that was given by the users of the bot to have their conversations stored. Apparantly, the conversations are "anonymous" and given cute names like "Red Squirrel", but the date and time is stored, as most certainly the IP address would also be stored. This is considered identifying information.
  I asked about informed consent and ethics board approval for this research, apparently neither was done. I looked at the bot myself, looking for where I am being informed that what I am typing is being stored and can be used for future research. Since I am in the EU using this system, it must either ask my permission or not permit me to use it.
  Alright, enough bitching. They meant well, but the company that sold this bot to them needs to shape up their advertising language and be open about what they are storing. As long as you are transparent about what you are doing, people have a choice of using the system or not.
  
• The day closed with "30 Years of Research & Lessons Learned": David Rettinger and Trician Bertram Gallant decided to put together an issue of the Journal of College and Character on academic integrity. They asked around and got lots of great papers—and realized they were not only over the page count for the issue, they were MASSIVELY over the page count for the issue. So they decided to make a virtue out of necessity and put split the papers between the journal and a book, Cheating Academic Integrity: Lessons from 30 Years of Research, that will appear in June 2022. What a great way to make all these papers available! The authors who were at the conference spoke a bit about what they were writing about. The journal issue is available open-access, so I downloaded all the papers right away, and have the book on order!
  

Day 3, March 10, 2022

• I started off visiting the COIN group, Consortium for Online Integrity. I wanted to hear more about how people were doing assessments online. There are a number of universities that swear by remote proctoring, either personal remote proctoring or "AI"-based (remember, the term "artificial intelligence is a synonym for "magic fairy dust") proctoring. I find remote proctoring to be an invasion of privacy and to use algorithms that are heavily biased. People believe that they can "lock down" browsers, but my CS students don't need more than 10 minutes to get out of that. So it doesn't do what people want it to. Don't project what you want onto a software! Software cannot solve social problems.
  
• Christian Moriarty moderated a town hall on the future of ICAI. Thomas Lancaster and I had a nice little public disagreement about the use of technology that really lit up the chat :) I believe that academic integrity is a social issue and thus cannot be solved by technology alone, as I just mentioned. We need to focus on pedagogy.
  
• Angela Murphy asked in her presentation "The Usage of Remote Proctoring Technologn to Uphold Academic Integrity During a Pandemic": Is there more cheating going on in the pandemic? Many instructors think so, but maybe they just didn't see the cheating that went on before the pandemic! She was very enthusiastic about remote proctoring, but I find it an invasion of privacy and a waste of instructor time reviewing the videos. I personally thnik that we need to focus more on alternative assessments that what we have been doing before. 
• Kathryn Baron, the host of the podcastthescore.com podcast, spoke on "Helping journalists inform the public about cheating". She apparently didn't realize who was in the audience, as she spent 15 minutes telling us what we already know in depth: There is a lot of cheating out there. It was a bit disappointing. I already help journalists who contact me by sending them links to sources for what I am saying. And I patiently explain over and over again that we don't know how much plagiarism is out there because we only know what we find, not what we don't find. And yes, there was plagiarism before the Internet. My major problem is that journalists are generally only interested when the person found having submitted a plagiarism is well-known, i.e. a politician. And the universities, well, this picture of a man with his head in the sand rather sums it up. 
• Unfortunately, the presenters on "Factors impacting academic integrity: a review" didn't show up and didn't let anyone know that they were not coming. So I went to the session by Ide Bagus Siaputra from Indonesia "Transforming modular training into integrated immunization programme for promoting academic integrity: Celebrating 9 Years of progress". He has been instrumental in getting a discussion going about academic integrity in his country and has prepared materials for teachers there.
• David Rettinger finished up the conference talking about the ICAI/McCabe Survey. I am so glad that Don McCabe's work is continuing! The survey is geared to determine the rates of academic misconduct, assessing the climate of integrity, understanding student perspectives, and providing a benchmark against other institutions. They are starting with a first round in 2022 for ICAI member institutions, currently have 7800 surveys completed. It will be exciting to hear these results! And during the discussion I realized that David and I met years ago [I looked it up: 2012] in Bielefeld, Germany, where Don McCabe was giving a talk after having given a talk in Berlin. I drove Don down and we had very intensive discussion during the drive down.
  

Whew, it's been an exhausting 3 days, starting so late in the day. But I'm so glad I attended, lots of new ideas and meeting a few new people, if not as many as one meets at in-person conferences. 

Now, hope to see people at the ENAI conference ECAIP 2022 in Porto, Portugal 4-6 May 2022 in real life!

ECAIP 2021 - Day 3

 What? It's Friday already? Last day of the conference! Lots of good stuff still to hear.

Day 0 - Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3

ECAIP 2021 - Day 2

European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021

Day 0 - Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3 

ECAIP 2021 - Day 1

It's conference time again! The European Conference for Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021 (#ECAIP2021 on Twitter, organized by the European Network for Academic Integrity) has started. I will try to make a few notes on the talks for those who are unable to attend. My plan was to do the blogging on my new iPad and use my Mac with a second screen for attending the conference, but Google won't let me into the blog if I don't give it telephone numbers and shoe sizes, so I'll have to be doing some juggling here.

Day 0 - Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3

6IIPC - Conference

I previously reported about the pre-conference of the Sixth International Integrity and Plagairism Conference in Newcastle upon Tyne, I will now discuss some of the talks that I was able to attend.
There were four keynotes at the conference:

• Toni Sant from Wikimedia UK spoke about student online research, aka using the Wikipedia. I was astounded at how many educators in the room were not very familiar with various aspects of how the Wikipedia is researched and written. Toni suggested that teachers have their students write articles for the Wikipedia – I strongly objected to that in the discussion, as the subsequent deletion of articles that are not encyclopaedic will frustrate the students.
• Tricia Bertram Gallant, the academic integrity officer at UCSD, gave a fanstastic talk about integrity for the "Real World." She pointed out that people cheat, period. We have to quit pretending that we are only interested in academic integrity, that is, integrity that is only valid in school. Instead, we need to reframe our thinking and focus on building integrity for the real world and not just for school. Our students cheat and plagiarize because they are human, we need to help them obtain skills in acting in an ethical manner in any situation, not just academic ones.
• Samantha Grant presented parts of her documentary about Jason Blair, a New York Times Journalist fired for plagiarism, called A Fragile Trust.  She and Teddi Fishman from the International Center for Academic Integrity then discussed questions that arose from the film. Samantha is now producing a game for journalists called Decisions on Deadline that presents ethical dilemmas for students to solve. The Society of Professional Journalists even has a hotline that journalists can call when they need to speak to someone anonymously.
• Dan Ariely gave us the honest truth about dishonesty via video conference: We lie. We don't steal if given the opportunity, but if we think we can get away with something, we lie through the teeth, according to the many studies he has conductd. He suggests that we as educators need to teach our students about temptation and how to deal with it. 

In between the keynotes there were nine paper sessions of five papers or workshops each. Unfortunately, the program had some glitches, such as both papers about finding plagiarism in Arabic being scheduled in parallel with each other or three workshops in the area of embedding institutional policy and practice offered at the same time.
One talk was especially amusing: Rui Silva-Sousa from Portugal spoke about whistleblowers on plagiarism and the moral grey area. That is, he was speaking about GuttenPlag Wiki or VroniPlag Wiki, among others. He notes that there is currently a moral panic with respect to plagiarism. The general population perceives an increase of plagiarism among politicians on the basis of media coverage. This legitimizes the culture of control and people will now more than ever report wrongdoing, especially for egoistic reasons, on the part of people who are now in the public eye. He tried to explain the motivation of the researchers documenting plagiarism, and decided they are somewhere between weird mobbers and serious scientists. They must be acting on ethical egoism and through their making the cases public, can cause excessively harsh results in the life of the person who plagiarized. He felt that knowing the names of the whistleblowers would make it easier to judge the morality of their work. 
I noted in the discussion that he was completely ignoring the person whose work was plagiarized, and that a thesis was plagiarized irregardless of who speaks up about this fact. During a discussion over lunch we cleared up some misconceptions, the usual ones such as VroniPlag Wiki not only documenting politicians, and such. He admitted to not having looked at the sites that closely. I do wish that people would observe carefully before coming up with wild theories.
Mike Reddy, who teaches Games Development at the University of South Wales, gave a session on putting the "play" into plagiarism. We were to develop a game concerning some aspect of academic integrity within the hour. Our group didn't do too bad, we came up with a game we called "Freeloader", similar to Spoof, for 5–6 players (the size of a typical student project group).  Each person has three coins and behind their backs chooses how many coins to hide in their fist and put out into the middle, representing their contribution to the project. Each person starts out with three peanuts/candies/whatever. Each person guesses how many coins in total are now in the middle, no two guesses can be the same. All fists are opened and the coins counted – if you guess right, you get a candy from everyone else in the group. If you run out of candies, you get a dog's chance (one last round). If there are only two people left, the amount of candies you have to surrender upon being wrong is increased by one each round, so that there a winner is found quickly who will get the top grade (i.e. a stash of candies).
Phil Newton from the university of Swansea gave a workshop about paper mills and custom-writing companies. He showed live demonstrations of things that are available for sale. In a nutshell: If we are asking for it (such as research diaries or multiple revisions), there is someone out there willing to sell it, and the less time there is left to complete it, the more expensive it is. We got into groups and tried to come up with ideas that focus more on the learning and less in producing items that can be easily ghosted. The ideas ranged from only giving examinations, using peers to police, flipped classrooms, thinking positively, using progression portfolios, decreasing the price of doing the right thing, and increasing the fear factor: if we catch you, it will hurt. In all, we didn't come up with THE solution, but it was good to commiserate with others about the problem.

It was great to meet old friends and meet new people interested in plagiarism, although it was sad to have to miss so many sessions. The conference was co-sponsered by Turnitin and ICAI, so of course many of the talks dealt with Turnitin. It was rather shocking to see how many newish users were so sure that the so-called "similarity index" that Turnitin reports is the true value of "plagiarism" in a paper. Some schools even define Turnitin similarity index levels for determining the sanction to be meted out. However, people with more experience using the system often temper their words, they understand that the number does not mean anything, really, and that the software is just a tool. Even Turnitin has started to speak of itself as a text-matching software in some instances. I suggested to one of the Turnitin top brass that they ditch the number and focus on what their system does best: find matching text strings (and not plagiarism!). Turnitin has just recently been acquired by a venture capital company, so they have some money to invest in making the product better. I hope that the focus will be on the usability and the reports and not on suggesting that they find more plagiarism. The decision as to whether something is to be considered plagiarism or not must rest firmly with the instructor and the institution, not with a software package.

Jonathan Bailey has blogged extensively on Day One - Day Two - Day Three of the conference. 

6IIPC - Pre-conference

[I wanted to blog directly from the Sixth International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference in Newcastle, but Google cooked up a cool new idea to try and force me to give them my telephone number. Since I was logging in from a different location and a different computer (duh), I needed to give them my telephone number in order to get at my account. I could not reset the password until 3 days after I last logged in. I have one account for email (which I had just checked before) and one for blogging that I wanted to switch to. It took an email to Google to get me to a place where I could say: yes, that was me, which is what I would say if I was breaking in, too.]

Day 1: Starting out

The pre-conference workshop was about creating a plagiarism policy.

• Randa Al-Chidiac, from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Lebanon, is a librarian who spoke about instituting a plagiarism policy at a school that does not currently have one. She made it clear that it is vital to have upper management be committed to the project. A school needs to define for itself what is acceptable academic practice and what sorts of sanctions they plan on meting out. The process has to be understandable, transparent and fair. She suggests that the libraries take charge of the situation, as they are publishing the theses that are potentially found to contain plagiarism. They need to speak with faculty, and develop flow charts for faculty to follow. Only as a last step should technology be introduced.
• Loc Pham Quoc, from the Hoa Sen University in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam is the dean of the Faculty of Languages and Cultural Studies. The university was the first one in Vietnam to take action for promoting academic integrity, so they were able to get media interest aroused. He set up a club called FACE (For A Clean Education) and has involved the students (and their parents and potential employers) in many activities from public discussions to designing posters for promoting academic integrity to training 20 students as communicators that help their fellow students understand how to avoid plagiarism. He noted that plagiarism is NOT rooted in culture, as the dominant culture can change. Vietnam has had many cultures: Chinese, French, American. And now they are beginning to take action to promote a culture of good academic practices.
• Wole Morenikeji, from the Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria, spoke about the program instituted at his university. They appear to rely on plagiarism detection software and have rules about the “amount” of “similarity” that can be tolerated. This sparked quite a debate about the (mis-)use of these numbers generated from plagiarism detection software for the purpose of sanctioning.
• After lunch two people from Turnitin spoke, and rather repeated what Randa Al-Chidiac said, so there is no need to repeat it here. Then there was a discussion panel that brought up some important points. Accreditation boards have actually made universities change rulings that they have previously made in academic integrity cases. And one vice-chancellor from Afrika noted that his university does not have Internet, because they do not have stable electricity. His students write their papers with their mobile phones, but the teachers have no Internet for checking them. He is currently installing solar panels in the hopes of soon being able to have 24/7 Internet available.
• The first keynote was from Adrian Slater who was discussing collaboration and group work and plagiarism. He tried an exercise to get the room active, and people did participate, but since there was no time to really discuss the issues and there were so many questions to look at, the whole session remains a muddle in my mind.
• After a nice reception a group broke out to go to a local bar that is on the sixth floor and completely in glass. We had a marvelous view of the Tyne and the town while having a beer and discussing paper mills and ghostwriting. There was not a lot in the way of solutions found, but it was good to commiserate and to hear that others are also grappling with this problem for which there is no software-based solution.

COPE European Seminar 2014

I gave a talk at the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) European Seminar 2014 in Brussels yesterday on manual versus automatic plagiarism detection.

The first talk was by Simon Godecharle, from the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Law, Faculty of Medicine, University of Leuven, Belgium. He is a PhD student who is collecting policy documents on guidance about research and publication ethics in the EU. He was wondering why there were so many scientific scandals in Europe and decided to go have a look at the policy documents available. Out of 31 nations looked at, only 19 had any kind of policy document at all, although these were the major research nations. He found 49 national level guidance documents in English, French, German, Dutch or Italian, i.e. languages he could read.

The only countries with a national policy that has been implemented in law are Norway and Denmark. Germany, England Sweden, Finland, Austria, and the Netherlands at least have a national policy, even if it is not encoded in law. The wide variation of the topics and the severity of the different transgressions surprised him. He noted that too many rules make it harder for a scientist to decide what to do when faced with an ethical dilemma. He will be publishing his collection, I look forward to seeing it.



Ana Marusic, a professor for anatomy from the University of Split School of Medicine, Croatia, Ed. in Chief of Journal of Global Health spoke about Differences in publication ethics in Central and Eastern Europe. This was important in showing the difficulties that researchers from countries that do not speak English have in getting their voice heard and their research published. 



Christopher Baethge, the Chief Scientific Editor of the German monthly journal for doctors,  Deutsches Ärzteblatt explained their novel bi-lingual concept. They now publish all research papers in a translated version online at http://www.aerzteblatt.de/int. They pay medical translators to translate the papers in an effort both to make German research more visible and also to help German-speaking doctors get more comfortable with English-language research.




One of the major problems they encountered was their conflict of interest form. They print the coi now, and have been receiving complaints that they are publishing too much research financed by the pharmaceutical industry. Apparently, that hasn't really changed but is being made transparent now. They have tried to get other publishers such as Springer to use their coi form, they refused.




In the discussion after my talk a few very good points were made that plagiarism detection system should take to heart in order for them to be useful for journal editors:

• Kill the numbers ("originality index"). They are usually wrong and don't mean more than an potential alarm. A color-coded system might be more effective.
• Let the user grow a list of common terminology that is not flagged as plagiarism. Especially for journals there are a number of phrases peculiar to each area that almost every paper needs to have.
• Learn how to ignore the references, they are supposed to be exact copies of references given elsewhere! It's not enough to look for the reference section and then ignore it. Some texts have inline information, others footnotes or endnotes. Yes, I realize that Citavi alone has 6000 methods of noting references. This needs work.

We then had a workshop discussing 4 cases from the COPE database. They have over 400 cases there, all based on real cases. They are fascinating to read and to discuss with others.

Finally, Irene Hames, who is pretty much reachable all over the Internet, gave some statistics on the kinds of misconduct that are increasing, staying stable, and decreasing, according to their perception. She also presented their forthcoming taxonomy.

4th International Plagiarism Conference

I attended the 4th International Plagiarism Conference in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, this week, and presented a paper on my test cases for testing plagiarism detection systems. I had almost finished a very long version of this report when I wanted to find a YouTube link to add on the end. Since YouTube now insists that you use your Google account, I had to log out of my blog address, but continued typing. And so 2 hours of research and typing disappeared in a flash. I guess that I will need one different browser per Google "service" so that I don't mix them up. I'll try and retrieve from my brain:

Plagiarism Conference 2010

From my mailbox:

The Fourth International Plagiarism Conference, will take place on 21-23 June 2010 at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The deadline for extended abstracts of 1000 words and proposals is 29 January, 2010.

Papers, posters, video and workshop submissions are invited on the following themes:

• Creating a culture of honesty
• Ensuring authenticity in non text-based disciplines and multimedia
• Addressing non-traditional learning styles (e.g. overseas students, mature students etc)
• Ensuring the integrity of research and published work
• Open theme. Suggested topics include: innovative assessment techniques beyond the essay, the changing nature of authorship in a Web 2.0 world, contract cheating, plagiarism detection
  

Further details may be found at http://www.plagiarismadvice.org/submit2010.html

This fourth biennial conference, hosted by plagiarismadvice.org, and sponsored by Ofqual draws together delegates from the international educational community. In 2008 250 delegates from schools, colleges, universities, awarding and regulatory bodies along with commercial organizations from around the world met to share their experiences and expertise in this key area.

Keynote speakers

• Isabel Nisbet, Acting Chief Executive, Ofqua
• Jude Carroll, Deputy Director of the ASKe CETL at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
• Dr Teddi Fishman, Director of the Center for Academic Integrity, US.
• Adrian Slater, Head of Legal Services at the University of Leeds, UK.
  

Further information and registration details can be found at www.plagiarismconference.org.

Third International Conference on Plagiarism

I attended the Third International Conference on Plagiarism in Newcastle, England this past week and presented a paper there on my 2007 test of plagiarism detection software. Since the conference was sponsored by one of the large PDS systems used in England, I was expecting more of user's group meeting than a real conference.

And there were, of course, quite some papers that appeared to have been accepted only on the basis of them reporting something positive on the use of this system. But there were some very interesting points made and some interesting talks given, I want to put down some pointers here.

• One of the major discussion points was the shift perceived in student cheating from copy & paste to purchase of term papers from paper mills and ghostwriters. Since there is not a chance of detecting this kind of cheating with software, there is a call for more education about plagiarism. The University of Derby has a system it calls PLATO - Plagiarism Teaching Online that is designed to fill this gap. I will be evaluating this system in the near future.
• Another point was the topic of self-plagiarism. Tracey Bretag from the University of South Australia has been doing a lot of research on the topic.
• Fintan Culwin from London South Bank University did an empirical study on letting his students use a plagiarism detection service as a learning tool for their own writing. He measured the amount of "dirt" = plagiarism in the first drafts submitted and in the final versions of their papers - and was amazed to see them introducing "new dirt" while getting rid of some of the "old dirt".
• John Lesko runs a combined print and online journal on plagiarism calles Plagiary.
  
• There was a rumor that there exists a system that automatically grades essay questions, and a bit of a discussion on the ethics and legalities of using such a system.
  
• Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday spoke about how copyright applies to web sites and how to go about getting takedown notices served.
• Garry Allen of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia had some interesting graphs from Google Trends. You can query "plagiarism" and see how often people search using this term. More interesting is a search for "free essays" - you can literally see the end of the terms on the graphs! But the peaks are going down, there is no proof that this is because more plagiarism detection systems are being used. This could be because there now exist many link lists for students with relevant links, so they don't have to search Google. Interesting enough, the most such requests seem to come from India....

England itself has become a scary place, I was last there 20 years ago. The place is infested with video cameras. They were in the elevators, at breakfast, in the classrooms, outside the classrooms, all over the streets. I couldn't find one in the bathrooms, but I'm sure they were there. Gave me the creeps.

Update: Will Murray, one of the conference organizers notes: "the main sponsor was Ofqual (an independent UK national regulating body), iParadigms only sponsored the dinner on Tuesday and an independent academic committe decided on which papers should be included."

UK Plagiarism Conference

From http://www.plagiarismconference.co.uk/

"The 3rd International Plagiarism Conference, which is being managed by Northumbria Learning, examines the challenges facing institutions as they evolve solutions to the issue of ensuring authenticity in learners' work in a changing information environment. The conference will seek to consider best practice from secondary through to higher education. The need for a cross-sectoral approach is reflected in the joint sponsorship of the conference by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)."