Reports

Friday February 2 2007

Plagiarism and Other Types of Electronic Cheating

Nicole Perreault French staff member, Réseau REPTIC

The Issue
Practical Applications
Useful References
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Practical Applications

This section proposes ways to solve the dilemma of technologically assisted plagiarism. It contains two sections – Prevention and Detection.

PREVENTION

The work of Bergadaà and CEST-Jeunesse are unanimous in proposing significant preventative measures before concentrating on detection and sanctions at all academic levels. This work should be done with teachers as well as students, in ministerial offices as well as in courses. Let us now explore the nature of these activities.

At the ministerial and network levels

Awareness about electronic plagiarism and its consequences is recent. As seen before, its spread is linked to ignorance about rules for attributing Internet sources among students from their arrival at primary school. This is the reason why CEST-Jeunesse recommended to the “ministre de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport" (which was at the time the “ministre de l'Éducation du Québec") to inform students of the nature and the consequences of electronic plagiarism beginning in primary school, but also at all levels of instruction in an age and level appropriate manner.

In the university network, various initiatives for promoting awareness have been undertaken, for example,UQAM has developed a plagiarism website for professors detailing its consequences and ways to avoid it. Laval University has developed a site explaining how to cite electronic sources and the science and administration faculty has established a site explaining ways to prevent plagiarism. Similarly the University of Montreal has a site called “Intégrité, fraude et plagiat – prévention". All universities have created a code of conduct dealing with electronic plagiarism.

According to CEST-Jeunesse, it is important to define electronic plagiarism and to define punishment and rules. In the collegiate network, the site Profweb offers information about the nature and severity of electronic plagiarism and other forms of electronic cheating as well as a code of ethics for attribution of electronic sources suitable for the collegiate level. On the site there is a proposal for the creation of a forum on the issue as well as documentation on the topic of electronic plagiarism and other forms of cheating. If you are interested in the participating in the creation of such a space, please let us know in the ‘Comments’ section of this report.

Within the Information Technology Representatives network there is an exit profile for IT and other computer related activities for collegel level students. This profile indicates normal procedures to follow when citing sources. In the following months the IT Representatives will offer students (and teachers) a dynamic website focused on eithical practices related to the use of electronic sources and ways to avoid plagiarism while writing research reports.

At the cegep and college level

The PIEA

All Quebec cegeps and colleges have adopted an institutional policy of learning evaluation which includes a section dealing with plagiarism. More and more of these policies deal specifically with electronic plagiarism, what it is and how it can be sanctioned. This information is related to the CEST-Jeunesse article which indicates that the incidence of electronic plagiarism cannot decrease without the institution of rigorous and clear rules and sanctions.

A focus group on electronic plagiarism?

According to a survey of collegiate IT Respondents done in December 2006, several schools have already struck working committees to study the problem of electronically assisted plagiarism. Generally, these committees contain teachers, students, administrators and professionals and their mandate is to identify strategies to promote awareness and to react to electronically assisted plagiarism and cheating. One assumes that the work of these committees will contribute to a more sensitive response to this issue within the PIEAs.

Teacher training

Like many of your colleagues, you may be less at ease with the Internet than your students. It is therefore possible that you feel inadequate faced with the task of preventing and detecting electronic plagiarism. APOP offers a training course called The digital era and plagiarism: how to deal with the question and develop ethical student attitudes (This link is to an article about this activity on the French side of Profweb). An upcoming activity outlining different types of electronic plagiarism and cheating will be offered by the author in French at the AQPC Colloquium in June 2007.

If you would like one of these activities in your school, contact your IT Representative!

At the programme and course level

The anti-plagiarism contract

An increasing number of teachers have decided to have their students sign an anti-plagiarism at the beginning of the year. The document defines plagiarism, noting that copy-past without attribution is within the definition of the term, and it gives pointers on how to correctly cite sources. The document explains that plagiarism is not uniquely a question of copyright but rather an issue of intellectual honesty. It continues making the point that plagiarism can impede learning and prevent the acquisition of proper research and writing techniques. The contract can define punishment for plagiarism as well. This document insures that all students understand what electronic plagiarism and cheating is and the simple act of signing such a contract can discourage those who would otherwise be tempted to resort to such activities.

Tips for teachers to discourage electronic cheating in student research² Vary your questions – As with research, if you give the same exam year after year, there is an excellent chance that your students will have a copy.

- Favor class evaluations over take home exams – Frequent in-class evaluation, either summative or formative, forces students to stay up to date.
- Vary exam questions within each group – Software like Netquiz Proor Exam Studio allow you to create different versions of exams by varying the order of the questions.
- Limit the time allowed for on-line exams – Determine a maximum time for the test. In DECclic ExamStudio has this feature.
- If the exam is given in a computer lab or class:
  - Alert students to the importance of protecting their user name and password when they leave their workstation.
  - Make sure screens are easy to monitor – If the exam is in a lab, work with your college to arrange computers so as to minimize visibility from unit to unit for example in a horseshoe pattern.
  - Insure units are not WiFi enabled.
  - Make log-ins with passwords a requirement.
  - Forbid the use of cellphones.
  - Monitor USB key memory use – We all are familiar with these small finger-like gadgets that hold a wealth of information. IT_Reps know they can be quickly inserted and retracted!
  ° Be curious – Asking questions about methodology, sources of information and conclusions is a powerful dissuasion.
  ° Be cagey about your ability on the computer – Tell students that you can easily verify the origin of plagiarism on the Internet without going into details.
  ° Verify student process – A complex work can be evaluated progressively. Work in stages permits effectively targeted correction while verifying that the methodology required for the assignment is being respected. This staging puts the emphasis on learning (and intellectual development) rather than on results (and grades). Plagiarized work is difficult to use in such a fragmented process because it is complete.
  ° Require personal input – Insisting on examples from personal experience complicates the use of third party material.
  ° Propose precise and practical research – Research assignments that have limited scope and precise objectives are difficult to find on the Web. Establish precise objectives requiring personal observation and opinion as well as comparisons of results.
  ° Vary research and laboratory subjects – If you have not changed an assignment over several years (such as a report on Margaret Atwood or the same laboratory experiment), there’s a good chance that good examples of what to do are available in cyberspace and elsewhere as well. A rotation of assignments makes plagiarism more difficult because they cannot predict which material needs to be accessed.
  ° Make an interview template – If an interview is a course requirement, make a template mandatory as well as contact information of all participants. I
  ° Insist on a complete bibliography as well as complete source information for all quotes – Ask students to prepare a bibliography or mediagraphy. Require a copy of all texts used in reports with relevant passages underlined.
  ° Make an integrity clause obligatory – Insist on a signed statement such as: ‘I attest that this work is my own and that all work of others has been indicated as such with sources cited.’ Although similar to the anti-plagiarism contract discussed above, it is directly linked to the specific assignment.
  ° Make an oral explanation a part of the assignment – Students who have done their own work will be better able to explain it than those who resorted to copy-paste.
Tips for Examinations

DETECTION

You are evaluating an extremely well-written research paper. Is it too well written to be the work of your student? This section gives you simple and effective tips to help you confirm or eliminate your suspicions. Afterwards, it will present an option used by American, Canadian and European universities, namely plagiarism-detecting software.

Tips

- Evaluate style changes – Compare the style of the paper in question with other written work (e-mails, exams, exercises) already submitted by the student. One can anticipate more care being put into a major work which is probably the result of several revisions, but too great a difference could indicate outside input.
- Look for copy-paste markers – The absence of logical transitions from one paragraph to another or abrupt changes in style within the same text could be indicators of telltale stylistic overlap when the work of one writer meets that of another.
- Verify enriched bibliographies – The work contains abundant, pertinent references that are unavailable at the library. The student should be able to provide the sources where these sources are available.
- Question page layout variation – An integrally written text has the same formatting unless there is a valid reason to change. Blocks of text with different fonts, spacing or margins are the smoking gun of copy-paste plagiarism indicating Internet origins with different layouts.
- Inaccurate references to graphics or tables – A text which refers to a table that does not appear in the work or figures with numbering out of sequence are also strong indicators of plagiarized text.
- Inactive Websites in the mediagraphy - Websites become out of date and are removed from the web or change address, but an abnormal amount of unavailable sites in the mediagraphy are a sign of text written in the past.
- Submit extracts of the work to a search engine like Google – Even if you do not use a computer regularly, learn to check for plagiarism in less than two minutes using a search engine. To search for a site with words in the same order as your text, enclose it in quotation marks. Remember that this method is not foolproof. Search engines do not have access to sites that sell student work or password protected pages. If there are two spaces between words instead of one, the search engine can fail to recognize the source of the text.

Plagiarism-detecting software

For several years, a growing number of academic institutions have turned to plagiarism-detecting software which compares student work with a data base maintained by the service provider.

Even if there are ethical questions raised around this popular tool in the fight against plagiarism (see the discussion of this issue in the CEST-Jeunesse report), its small but critical difference is that abovementioned database.

Among service providers for this type of software, one of the most reputable is Turnitin. Service fees include an US$800 annual license as well as a US$1.50 per student charge. In a video broadcast on the Fox network and now available on the web, one can hear an instructor’s endorsement of Turnitin software through his own concrete experience using the product.

Turnitin has many competitors. A cegep or college faces a difficult choice when purchasing this type of service. The Thot site names several French and English options. Bergadaà suggests 10 10 questions to select the right anti-plagiarism software. The characteristics evaluated include ease of operation, software efficiency and operating time among others.

How does one act on this report?

As we have seen, electronic plagiarism and cheating is an extremely current issue which is legitimately the object of concern. Luckily, there are a several ways to deal with it, one being to make students aware of the principle of intellectual honesty which is at its core, as well as to insure awareness of plagiarism’s consequences. This report also contains practical tips to reduce electronic plagiarism and cheating, at the ministerial level and the collegiate level as well as the programme and course level.

Once again, please share your opinions and experiences about electronic plagiarism and cheating in the discussion space below or in Profweb’s Comments section.

_________________

^{2 Sources of information for the prevention and detection tips for research and examinations:}

^{Bergadaà, M. Internet : fraude et déontologie selon les enseignants universitaires. http://responsable.unige.ch/index.php [on line]. Site consulted - November 29, 2006.}

^{Réseau Éducation-Médias. Comment décourager le plagiat [on line]. Page consulted – December 28, 2006. Faculté des Sciences de l’administration de l’Université Laval.}

^{Trucs et stratégies à l’intention de l’enseignant pour la prévention du plagiat [on line]. Site consulted January 1, 2007.}

^{Le plagiat, comment le prévenir. In Université de Sherbrooke, Le Trait d’Union. www.usherbrooke.ca/ssf/tu/vol_5/no_2/plagiat.html. [on line]. Page consulted December 27, 2006.}

^{Thot/Cursus. Comment limiter la tricherie dans les examens en ligne – by the University of Illinois. thot.cursus.edu/rubrique.asp. [on line]. Page consulted Novembre 10, 2006.}

^{Saut quantique. Dossier Tricherie sur Internet. www.apsq.org/sautquantique/doss/d-tricherie.html.. [on line]. Page consulted January 4, 2007.}

^{Translator’s note : These works are in French. Additional references in English have been added to the Useful References Listings.}

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Comments by readersReact to this text

The Ryerson Facebook Issue

The Facebook plagiarism scandal happening at Ryerson is an interesting twist to this issue. You can read about it in http://www.theglobeandmail.com.

Norm Spatz, animaweb, Profweb [2008-3-12]

A New Low!

Electronic plagiarism has hit a new low! On the site of ExamEar [ http://www.examear.com ], now closed, there was a catchy subline of 'helping students to succeed worldwide'. This Canadian site sold kits containing a nearly invisible flesh coloured in-ear receiver with a handle cleverly disguised as an ear hair. Students need not have a confederate nearby providing answers. An mp3 recorder placed outside of the classroom could do the job! Prices for packages began at $185.00. Be the first one on your block!?

Norman Spatz, Animaweb, Profweb [2007-8-19]

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