首页学术资讯Turnitin hones new weapon in essay arms race

Turnitin hones new weapon in essay arms race

时间:2018-07-27 编辑整理:早检测网 来源:早检测网

The neck-and-neck race between essay cheating websites and anti-cheating programs continues, and US organisation Turnitin is hard at work on a new offering.

Its Authorship Investigation cheating detection program will be launched in the second half of this year, according to the ­Turnitin website. “Research from around the world has reinforced the scope and global nature of this concerning behaviour,” the website says, of contract cheating.


Academics around the world are now testing the Authorship Investigation program, including researchers from the US, Britain and from a number of Australian universities: Deakin, Griffith, the University of Queensland and the University of Wollongong.



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UOW business faculty academic integrity and assessment director Ann Rogerson has been involved in the Authorship Investigation research. She can’t comment on it before the program is released, but it is a continuum of her previous work investigating paraphrasing websites.


Cheating students can simply cut and paste a chunk of journal text into one of these paraphrasing websites. The site will paraphrase the copy within seconds and the students can pass it off as their own work, while evading plagiarism detection. Effort expended by the student: almost none. Lessons learned: cheating can be free and easy.


Dr Rogerson believes there is now a plague of paraphrasing tool sites on the internet: thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands, of them. Some are free, presumably relying on advertising revenue. Others charge a fee.


International students sometimes don’t even realise that using a paraphrasing site to reprocess someone else’s original work is a form of cheating, she says, because, after all, writing essays requires some level of paraphrasing: students absorb ideas from various sources and then produce their own work.


 

“Students might say to me, ‘But the author wrote it so well, that’s a revered person, they have a PhD, how could I possibly put their work into my own words?’,” Dr Rogerson says. “Students have varying levels of confidence in their English language writing capability, and sometimes they lack the confidence that they can interpret words correctly.”


The prevalence of this form of paraphrase cheating is difficult to estimate with any degree of accuracy, Dr Rogerson says.


Yet academics can accustom themselves to the style and flavour of paraphrased tool work, making it easier to spot.


“Once you see it, it’s a lot easier to pick up,” Dr Rogerson adds.


She uses examples to launch discussions with her students in class, when she points out how poor the output is, and how important it is to learn how to write clear English prose for anyone who aspires to work in a multinational company.


Using paraphrasing tools and then submitting the work as their own is essentially cheating, she tells them, and since they have paid for an Australian university education, they should make the most of it.


Academics cannot yet rely on programs such as those offered by Turnitin to find paraphrase tool-related cheating.


Although the commercial, plagiarism-detection service, which was launched in 1997, does its best to stay abreast of cheating developments, when Dr Rogerson used it on examples of paraphrased cheating, it detected only about half of them.


“They’re looking at patterns of text,” she says.


“In the experiment I did for the journal article, Turnitin picked up about 50 per cent of reference list errors.”


She has found the range of paraphrase tools available on the internet is varied and the quality of the paraphrasing depends on the tools’ algorithms.


“The free tools tend to use a more simplistic synonym replacement,” she says. “They’re not looking at semantic meaning, and that’s why they create these word salads. The algorithm can’t cope with the words and it just spits out rubbish.”


Some students, she says, know to correct some of the worst mistakes, which then makes detection more difficult.


“If you have good quality English language skills, you can tell it’s rubbish,” she says.


“You might then correct some of the things it’s misrepresenting. But I found with student use of it, they often don’t see the errors. They trust the internet, say, to calculate temperature, to calculate distance, and they trust it to change the words as well.”


International students often use online translation tools when they are working on essays and assignments, Dr Rogerson says. “When they’re writing something in English, they’ve got translation tools actually working on their Word for Windows for example, where it’s sitting over words and translating them into a language they can understand,” she says.


Turnitin 论文检测系统地址:http://www.zaojiance.net/turnitin/



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