Van Hoorebeek, M --- "Part One: Turnitin and the Perils of Entering the Evil House of Cheat at Cheathouse.Com; Part Two: Hold the Emails: 'Senior Academic Caught by New Anti-plagiarism Software'" [2004] LegEdDig 14; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 19

Part One: Turnitin and the Perils of Entering the Evil House of Cheat at cheathouse.com
Part Two: Hold the emails: ‘Senior Academic Caught by New Anti-plagiarism Software’

M van Hoorebeek

[2004] LegEdDig 14; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 19

37 Law Teacher 2, 2003, pp 174–187

Plagiarism is one of the most serious offences in the academic world. It has occurred as long as there have been teachers and students, but recent growth of the Internet has made the problem much worse. Recent studies indicate that approximately 30 percent of all students may be plagiarising on every written assignment they complete.

Academics at all British universities and colleges can test students’ work for cheating using the anti-plagiarism program Turnitin. The program, run by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and thought to be the first national system of its kind, offers free advice and a plagiarism detection service to all further education institutions in the UK.

The aims of this article are to define exactly what plagiarism is, give examples and reports on samples of the new plagiarism detection software and, finally, to suggest strategies that lecturers can use before turning to the new software.

Websites, such as cheathouse.com, have been set up to give students’ access to the essays of other students. They have subsequently become big business. One market opportunity, however, often creates another and a rapid rise in the software designed to catch the cheats has been seen. The subscriber base of Turnitin, a leading anti-plagiarism software house based in Oakland, California, USA, has risen rapidly. In Britain JISC, the unit responsible for advising the countries’ universities on information technology, has tested the firm’s software in five institutions. Every university lecturer in the country is now able to vet his student submissions with it.

Plagiarism is the unauthorised appropriating and utilising of another’s ideas, works or compositions and presenting them as one’s own. It may amount to the tort of passing off or a breach of copyright under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A student may plagiarise deliberately or unintentionally. Some common types of plagiarism include: (1) submitting another student’s paper with or without that student’s knowledge; (2) copying a paper or paraphrasing information from text without proper documentation; (3) purchasing and turning in a paper from a peer, research service, or term paper mill; and (4) downloading and submitting a paper from a ‘free term paper’ website.

Turnitin’s software chops each paper submitted for scrutiny into small pieces of text. Whenever a matching pattern is found, the software makes a note. Tutors can submit a piece of work electronically, which will then be checked for copying with material on the Internet. Four hours later the work will be returned to the tutor, colour-coded according to the findings. If more than 75 percent of the text can be matched elsewhere then it will be highlighted in red. If less than 10 percent of the material can be matched it comes back in blue. Text can also be highlighted in orange, yellow or green according to the amount of text matched.

What signs should the teachers look for before resorting to the plagiarism busting software?: (1) checking for unusual formatting or formatting that does not match the assignment requirements; (2) noticing mixed paragraph styles and various skill levels of writing; (3) reviewing the references used in the paper; (4) referring to the original assignment and seeing if the paper is about the assigned topic and if it contains the information that it required; and (5) reviewing the citation styles.

The new so-called plagiarism-busting software adds a new weapon to the armoury of the lecturer at war with the student plagiarist. It is proposed that Turnitin can provide a valuable service to lecturers, the software being best used as a teaching tool to raise student awareness. A bulk marking academic may well encounter problems when using this piece of software for large amounts of marking. Turnitin is only likely to bring victory if used in conjunction with digital submission and other plagiarism prevention strategies.

Plagiarism is a perennial problem for lecturers as the sheer amount of information available on the Internet is making the process of marking a laborious one. From a lecturing perspective, the concept of a student passing a year-long module with flying colours at the touch of a button or a click of a mouse is an uncomfortable one at the best of times. When faced with hundreds of scripts and a deadline, the concept is personally insulting to many lecturers. Student plagiarists tend to believe that cut-and-paste plagiarism provides an easy option and that their theft will be difficult to detect. However, a personally insulted academic tends to be a canny and scrupulous marker. The student belief that anything over the Internet is fair game and in the public domain is seriously misguided. Realisation only occurs when the student plagiarist is in front of a disciplinary board, asking to be allowed to continue his or her education.

The question posed to academic institutions (and the teaching profession as a whole) is a difficult one. Will a piece of software ever be able, first, to handle the volume of marking, second, master all the material available, and third, give peace of mind to the bulk marking academic?

The JISC detection service is based on Turnitin software that has been developed and supplied by the US company iParadigms. This software is available free for a brief trial period to any Internet user. The main strength of this software is the direct source comparison that allows a user to click on any of the links to open a window containing the piece from which the sentences were copied. The software does not pick up on all of the paper based journal articles that were flagrantly plagiarised but this aspect may be mitigated by the software’s capacity to develop.

Eliminating cybercheating is an unrealistic goal but reducing it is not and this software will help with this aim. There are specific points that can be brought to the fore: (1) Plagiarism is a central issue involved in any form of teaching. Specific and up-to-date question setting implemented intelligently may suffice to lessen the temptation to cut and paste or download essays. (2) The Turnitin software only deals with electronic plain text input; student material thus needs to be submitted in digital form. An advanced Google based search would seem to be more practical when dealing with paper based submissions. (3) Plagiarism prevention is deemed to be better than the proverbial plagiarism cure. (4) A final problem that users of Turntin may encounter is the time taken to submit multiple submissions; a bulk marking academic may encounter over 400 scripts during any given year. Many will find that the administrative problems of dealing with the electronic submission of electronic scripts will render the usage of Turnitin indefensible. Just how far will the existing administrative procedure need to be altered to accommodate the new detection software?

Plagiarism inhabits the space between the original utilisation of words and the unattributed copying of another author’s work. It provides an uncomfortable problem to anyone involved in education as it questions one of the base foundations of learning and education: how do you assess a piece of work? It is impossible to completely eradicate and is damaging to both individual and institutional reputations. It is generally felt within the vast literature base that careful and judicious use of anti-plagiarism techniques can reduce this problem. The Turnitin software provides a useful tool to be utilised in conjunction with these techniques.