Plagiarism and How to Combat it! Anti Plagiarism

In-Class Exercise Check out this page for detailed descriptions of how students cheat

EVE (Essay Verification Engine)
A downloadable application that performs complex searches against text, Microsoft Corp. Word files, and Corel Corp. WordPerfect files.
www.canexus.com

http://www.findsame.com scans the Web for matching sentences or whole documents, instead of just keywords

HowOriginal.com
A free service that checks a 1K chunk of text against Internet resources for plagiarism. Written samples are not added to their database.
www.howoriginal.com

Plagiarism.org
Self-described �online resource for educators concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism.�
www.plagiarism.org and www.turnitin.com

Plagiarized.com
�The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism.�
www.plagiarized.com

PaperBin.com
A commercial service that checks student papers against its paper database. It bills itself as a plagiarism-prevention service.
www.paperbin.com

PlagiServe
A free site that checks against paper mill sites to find copied text.
www.plagiserve.com

The Plagiarism Resource Site
http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/

WordCHECK
http://www.wordchecksystems.com/

This service takes a digital fingerprint of the student's paper, then scans the Internet and the group's own database looking for matches, highlighting passages that match and providing links to the online source. Turnitin.com, a popular service, offers a simple method that allows both teachers and students to submit papers to electronic scrutiny. The service compares the paper against millions of Web sites, a database of previous submissions and papers offered by the so-called term-paper mills. Turnitin.com then sends a report with the results to the teacher. High schools using this service pay around $1,000 a year for an unlimited number of submissions. Colleges pay roughly $2,000. Dr. John M. Barrie, a founder of Turnitin.com, estimated that of all the work submitted to the site, nearly one-third is copied in whole or in part from another source.

Along with all new technologies there are positive and negative effects. The world wide web is not an exception to this. Does the Internet make it easier for students to plagiarize? Unfortunately, the answer is yes....

This is a point well-taken. What too few students -- and, frankly, too few faculty -- realize is how much easier the Internet makes the catching of e-plagiarists. Anything found on the Web can be found again, and very easily. The key is effective use of search engines. For those who want a basic introduction, searchengines.com -- http://www.searchengines.com/ -- offers a good introduction to the ever-proliferating variety. Especially useful means of tracking down plagiarized material are full-text search engines like AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/) and ones with obsessively refreshed and updated indexes like that of TrueSearch.com (http://www.truesearch.com/). The trick, especially for full-text searches, is to drop in a string of words -- less than a sentence but enough to be a distinctive (maybe even unique) combination.

Such tracking down is literally push-button easy, and getting easier all the time. The latest wave (not all that recent, really) is of so-called metasearch engines (search engines that search the search engines and return results for, say, ten or more of them. Some of the better-known ones are Dogpile, Mamma, and MetaCrawler.

Given the ease of tracking down information, the real issue for students and faculty alike ought to be what to do with it. Information should be used, not cut-and-pasted. Assignments should ask students to do more than just report information, and students should understand that research usually has a purpose or point beyond re-presenting what someone else has presented. It's these things we ought to focus on, especially since tracking down stuff (whether as sources or as evidence of plagiarism) has become so easy.

This prProgram examines a collection of document files. It extracts the text portions of those documents and looks through them for matching words in phrases of a specified minimum length. When it finds two files that share enough words in those phrases, WCopyfind generates html report files. These reports contain the document text with the matching phrases underlined.

What WCopyfind can do: It can find documents that share large amounts of text. This result may indicate that one file is a copy or partial copy of the other, or that they are both copies or partial copies of a third document.

What WCopyfind cannot do: It cannot search for text that was copied from any external source, unless you include that external source in the documents you give to WCopyfind. It works on only purely local data�it cannot search the web or internet to find matching documents. If you suspect that a particular outside source has been copied, you must create a local document containing that outside material and include this document in the collection of documents that you give to WCopyfind.

GNU General Public License information � Wcopyfind is free software, but is covered by a license that places certain restrictions on its use, modification, and distribution.

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Plagiarism.org Online service for preventing plagiarism, deterring scholarly dishonesty and cheating, and raising academic ethics. Detects plagiarized papers by comparing www.plagiarism.org

Avoiding Plagiarism
Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial Affairs at the University of California, Davis.
sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm

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10th Annual Meeting Center for Academic Integrity Colorado Springs, Colorado November, 2000