|
Reference > Cybercheating
> Detecting
Detecting Cybercheating/Online Plagiarism"Professors are so smart, they'd catch us in a heartbeat." A GW student quoted in The GW Hatchet in a 10/14/02 article on student plagiarism. Resources GW Faculty can use to detect cybercheating:Search Engines One way that students use the Web to plagiarize is through search engines. Use these online searching tools to locate online papers or parts of papers that students may have 'copied-and-pasted' into their own assignments. Take unique phrases or arcane language from the papers, plug them into the search box and see if any of your results match the suspicious passages or entire paper. Another way to see if a paper has been taken from the web is by utilizing the search engine's translation software (if available). See Alta Vista (http://www.av.com) for an example. Students can take papers written in foreign languages that are on the Web and using a search engine's translator, convert papers into English. Keep in mind that there is very little overlap in the web pages that search engines have in their databases, so try using two or three when attempting to find plagiarized material online. Sample search engine search: The following paragraph is an exerpt from a student's paper:
Try searching the phrase "the heyday of Royalty and Nobility" in Google. There are several web sites with this paper available free of charge. Some search engines to try:
Google
Alta Vista
Metacrawler
For links to other search engines, please consult the Gelman Library Web Search web page Gelman Library Resources Full-text article databases available through Gelman Library Another method students use to cybercheat is by incorporating passages or entire pages of articles they find via the subscription article databases available through Gelman Library. In a similar way to using search engines to discover if plagiarism has occurred, take unique phrases from the papers and search the article databases using the "Full-text" option. Sample article database search:
Using the phrase "render a message unintelligible", search Ebscohost's Advanced Search, expanding your search to include the full text of the articles. There is one article that results which includes the above phrase in it. Full-text article databases that GW student use most often:
Ebscohost All of these databases are available through the ALADIN homepage (http://www.aladin.wrlc.org) ALADIN Catalog Often, when students turn in previously written papers they have purchased or gotten for free off of the Internet, they don't bother to look at the references cited to make sure that they were ones available within either Gelman Library or the Washington Research Libraries Consortium (WRLC). Of course, students are encouraged to use Interlibrary Loan to obtain materials, but if the majority of the bibliography in question is full of resources not available locally, chances are that paper has been bought or taken directly off of the Web. Using the student's works cited or bibliography, look up the resources in the ALADIN Catalog. If the material is not available from any WRLC library, the student may have not used it to do research on his/her paper. Other Detection Resources Detection Services There are several companies that have developed plagiarism detection software and/or fee-based cybercheating services as a way to help faculty members, librarians and others combat this new form of academic dishonesty. Faculty members can purchase the detection software and do the detective work themselves, or they can pay the companies to take the suspected papers and run their contents through large databases of previously submitted papers and those essays and papers available online. A sample of the companies that provide these services are:
Plagiarism.org
Turnitin.com (part of Plagiarism.org)
PlagiServe
EVE2 (Essay Verification Engine)
Glatt Plagiarism Services
WordCHECK® KeyWORD Software
Next topic: Preventing Cybercheating/Online Plagiarism
|
