Plagiarism Resource Site

I stumbled upon the archives of the Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin (CBB) Plagiarism Resource Site. This site was developed between 2003 and 2007. There is an interesting collection of materials available, licensed under a Creative Commons license that lets other schools use the materials if they are used non-commercially, with attribution, and the resulting materials are also put under the same license.

It is a shame that the site has not been able to continue its development, but there are many good things to be found here for people who believe as I do: Teach, don't police.

Nobel Laureate accused of plagiarism

The Märkische Oder Zeitung (among others, it is a dpa story) reports that the Spanish Nobel Laureate for Literature Camilo Jose Cela (1916-2002) has been accused of plagiarism.

A judge in Barcelona has determined that there is enough evidence that the novel "La cruz de San Andrés" (The San Andrés Cross) for which he was awarded the Spanish literary prize "Planeta" in 1994, is similar to a novel by the relatively unknown author Maria del Carmen Formoso. The newspaper "El País" reports on April 21 that the judge's decision is based on an expertise prepared by a scholar of literature.

The court case is being brought against the publishing house Planeta, since Cela died in 2002. Formoso hat submitted her work to the prize committee two months in advance of Cela's submission. Formoso accused the publisher of giving her novel to Cela so that he could use it as a basis for his own work.

Formoso has been fighting for 10 years to get legal recognition of her case. She has twice lost cases in lower courts, but in 2006 the spanish constitutional court ordered a new trial. The court in Barcelona was requested to decide whether sufficient evidence is given to re-open the trial, which they now have done.

A Lesson Plan for Teaching about Plagiarism

I purchased a copy of the book "Student Plagiarism in an Online World - Problems and Solutions", XXX, 2008 by Tim S. Roberts (Ed.) for my research group despite the outrageous price (180$). 

I have previously blogged my opinion that XXX is a write-only publisher, and when I hold the book in my hands, it becomes even clearer. The book is hard-cover, in an impossibly large format, and very badly bound. At that price, I want a book that is well-bound and lies flat for use. There is no trace of the promised "free" online access to the text, which is a shame, as I could have used it today. 

Many of the chapters are long-winded or repetitive, that is, they could have used some tighter editing. But there are quite a number of good ideas to be found here and the references sections are quite extensive. 

The chapter by Frankie Wilson and Kate Ippolito, supposedly of Brunel University in the UK, although I find no home page or email for them there, contains an excellent lesson plan for a seminar about plagiarism. 

I decided at short notice to ditch my normal slideshow about plagiarism that I give to our first semester students and gave it a try, although the materials promised to be at a particular school page are not available (they return a 404). 

Our session is 90 minutes, and since we had not had an introductiory session yet, I spent 30 minutes with introductions of me and the students among themselves. This helped break the ice - everyone had already had to stand up and say something. 

We began by collecting definitions on index cards from the students on what their definition of plagiarism is. I made this into an individual exercise, in the plan given this is to be group work. I read them aloud and collected the high points on the board. About a quarter of the 32 people participating could not come up with a definition, and many focussed their definition on product plagiarism only. 

We then began to discuss "where to draw the line". We did this in plenum instead of in small groups, and this ended up being a lively discussion with excellent questions being voiced from the students. A major concern was: but how do I know what the source is, I just "know" something, I don't remember where I read it. We had a good conversation about note-taking and finding confirming evidence for that which one thinks one knows. 

The last section dealt with plagiarism avoidance - how a paper gets developed (and I got some words in on that ancient thing called a l-i-b-r-a-r-y) and the different kinds of references: direct quotation, indirect quotation, secondary source. 

 I then distributed 10 magazines and books to groups and have them find how references are used in these. I chose a selection of magazines and books that have different reference structures. They were very quick to identify these, and spent a few minutes glancing through the material that they had. 

We needed just 60 minutes, although the discussions were going so well that I am sure that we could have made it much longer. I would have liked to have had the worksheet promised in the chapter, but the lesson plan is well enough done that it can easily be adapted. 

I will post an update if I manage to find the material, I have written to the school asking for current emails of the authors and/or a current URL for the material.

Contract Cheating

Some interesting articles have shown up recently about the topic of "contract cheating" - students using Web 2.0 bidding sites to find a lowest bidder willing to do their homework for them for a price. Often, the coders or writers are to be found in developing countries.

• Thomas Bartlett, Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply - From Virginia to Manila: on the trail of papers for cash, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009
• Jessica Shepard, History essay in the making, The Guardian, May 6, 2008
• Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster, Contract Cheating Information Centre
• Clark and Lancaster have some great resources available, for example these screen shots of contract cheating in action or a list of 138 (!!) sites that offer the possibility of hiring a contractor. They have also set up an entry in Wikipedia on the topic.
  

In German, Spiegel Online author Sebastian Wieschowski has also reported on this phenomenon: Bestnoten mit Billigcode aus Bangladesch (good grades with cheap code from Bangladesch).

German University Takes Back Nine Doctorates

According to the German online magazine Spiegel Online, the University of Hanover has taken back nine doctorates in law which were granted between 1998 and 2005.

A law professor, Thomas A., from the university had taken in much money from lawyers and judges who wanted to have the coveted "Dr." to put in front of their names. Unlike the States, where the President, Vice President, and First Lady all have JD degrees but don't get called "Dr.", in Germany you can have the title put on your passport, bolted on your door, and make everyone call you "Dr. X".

At least eight lawyers (a number of them public servants and district attorneys) and one judge so desperately coveted that title - but didn't have the time to do the work - that they engaged a "doctoral consultant". They paid the company, in this case the "Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung" in Bergisch Gladbach, a fee, the company bribed the law professor, and they were soon awarded their degrees.

Fifty-nine more cases are pending.

Prof. A. took in over 150,000 Euros from candidates, receiving 2000 Euros for accepting a candidate and getting a bonus of 2000 Euros when it was completed. The potential doctors paid up to 25,000 Euros for their titles, for which there is normally no fee assessed.

A. was taken to court and found guilty of being bribed. He was sentenced to three years in prison, which is enough so that he loses his pension as well. The scam came to light as students requested in 2004 that A. not be on their examining committee because they did not want to appear to have purchased their grades. The university informed the legal authorities, who began an investigation. In September 2007 Prof. A. admitted to his deeds. During the court case in Hildesheim it was discovered that he not only took money, but also sexual favors for better grades.

The company is now bankrupt and the consultant, Martin D., has been in prison since the middle of last year on charges of bribery. He was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

The university decided to take back the nine doctorates, although most certainly most of the people involved will be taking the university to court on it - one has already filed, in the desperate hopes of overturning the university
decision on a technicality. Having to explain why the doctorate has suddenly disappeared might put a damper in one's career, although the person who had his doctorate taken back from the University of Tübingen on charges of blatant plagiarism has just gone to another university and taken a doctorate there. That university sees no problems with this.

False Positives

Inside HigherEd reports on a plagiarism detection track at a large writing conference in San Francisco. Two important points from the article

• One paper, given by a team from Texas Tech University, described an experiment in which they ran 400 papers (apparently of unknown plagiarism degree) through turnitin and SafeAssign. They discovered that the systems returned different values for degree of plagiarism (no suprise to me, as we almost never see identical values in our tests) and flagged many innocent bits as being potential plagiarisms. I cannot find a link to their paper, but the team is listed on the conference site as having given the session "Plagiarism Detection Technology: From the roundtable to the grail—deconstructing Turnitin and Safe Assignment" by Susan Lang, Laura Palmer, Monica Norris, and Kathleen Gillis.
• Much more troubling was the discussion in this article about how iParadigms, the company that sells turnitin, paid for the travel of some researchers who were giving (positive) talks about turnitin. Shouldn't a researcher, who perhaps has no travel money, at least tell the audience listening who paid for the travel? I realize this is rather like the company purchasing an ad on the first slide, but isn't it more transparent than a speaker saying nothing?

There are some good discussion posts at the end of the article (and a kind comment on this blog).

Umeå Study of Plagiarism Detection Software

An article in a Lund, Sweden, student newspaper I found complained that the university's choice of plagiarism detection software was bad because it only found 25% of the plagiarisms in a study done in 2006 by the University of Umeå.

After some unsucessful Googling I entered in a few words from the article and quickly found them in the abstract of two reports from 2006:

• Anna Nordström och Susanne Sjöberg: UTVÄRDERING AV URKUND, ETT VERKTYG FÖR PLAGIATKONTROLL. Oktober 2006. Report 16 (yes, the names of the reports seem to be a sick joke of the IT department on this sociology unit)
  

• Anna Nordström: UTVÄRDERING AV GENUINETEXT, ETT VERKTYG FÖR PLAGIATKONTROLL. Oktober 2006. Report 17

The first is a report commissioned from CERUM by an organisational unit of the University of Umeå about a test of the Swedish plagiarism detection software Urkund. CERUM is the Center for Regional Studies at the University of Umeå.

The university purchased a license for Urkund for four departments at the school for a year and had CERUM look at the usability, effectiveness, and moral problems associated with the use of the software. They interviewed teachers and students prior to and after use and describe very clearly the issues found. Among them:

• Teachers found the system easy to use, as students send their papers to an email address at Urkund. They then send on the paper to the teachers and later send a report on anything found to the teachers. This does, however, pose a problem as student's email addresses are used as the subject line and were often difficult to connect up to real names.
• Teachers felt that the system was effective.
• Using the system didn't save any time, but they feel that it is important for them to deal with plagiarism.
  
• Teachers and students alike felt that using the system worked as a deterrent to plagiarism.
• Students were generally happy with the software and had no moral or ethical problems, as they felt that everyone was being handled equally, something that is very important for Swedes.
  
• There was no mention made of the copyright problems. Urkund keeps a copy of all papers unless the students answer their acknowledgement email and request their paper not be put in a database.
• Neither teachers nor students felt that there was a problem in their relationship with each other based on the use of this system.
  

In order to test the effectiveness of the system, CERUM requested the four departments give them some common texts from textbooks, online resources, and magazines from their field, as well as from the Internet. Urkund says that it checks the Internet, many publications (including the Swedish National Encyclopedia), and of course their own database.

The researchers added material on their own in order to have 20 sources for each department. They then constructed test material (it is not clear from the report if they put all into one text or made a few papers, the report states differently in different chapters) and ran it through Urkund. Only 18 of the 80 sources were found by Urkund, a rather sorry result.

While the investigation was being done, it was discovered that there were a handful of teachers at the school using the Genuine Text system. This Swedish system, which according to their web page is used in Sweden, Denmark, Russia, and some parts of Africa, only searches the Internet and its own database. It is a web-based system that has three ways of submitting: students upload a file, teachers upload files, or they copy and paste material into a field. They offer statistics for administrators and plagiarism reports that are suitable for submitting to the appropriate disciplinary bodies. It is not clear from the report if students have a way of opting out of having their material stored in the database.

CERUM was commissioned to have a look at this as well, and they interviewed the teachers and students who had similar responses as the Urkund subjects. Interestingly enough, although Genuine Text does not test publication data bases, they managed to score 22 out of 80 plagiarisisms found. There were only 14 plagiarisms from the Internet, Genuine Text found 7 of them.

Both reports lead me to the following conclusions:

• The software proved just as ineffective in these tests as in mine. They find about half of the Internet sources and very little else.
  
• Teachers are so happy to have something found, that they believe it to be effective.
  
• The major use of plagiarism detection software is in deterrance. I found many forums in which students wondered how good the systems really were and what their chances for being found out were. There were tips being given on changing around words so as to confuse the system. Unfortunately, this works for many software systems, although Google can often deal with changed word order.
  
• No one considers copyright (or patent!) issues in student works, universities and companies keep copies without explicit permission, as would be necessary by EU copyright law.
• If the students are informed properly (orally and in writing) about the use of the software, they are happy about it being used.
  

I am attempting to contact the authors, who are no longer with the department, to see if I can find further information about the study.