[email protected] wrote:
Ken, I wonder if you would deem it appropriate -and/or if it is not too
much trouble- to share with us how it was that these students were able
to fool the service that your institution was testing.
Miguel asked for some examples of problems I encountered with a
well-known service. (I won't mention the service because my
examples are a couple of years old and the situation may have
changed. I will call it APS, anti-plagiarism service.)
1. The problem of identifying the "real" original.
I uploaded one of my "Mozart effect" papers which contained
several phrases that I had seen quoted in newspapers. The APS
passed it with a clean bill of health. Clearly the service was
not doing much looking on the net.
I was showing this issue to a colleague at another machine on
campus and he was flagged as plagiarising the paper from my
contribution.
After playing around with various contributions, here is what I
was able to do. The APS didn't check the entire net. Instead it
appeared to be keeping a record of a few select sites, including
the home institution website. The first contribution encountered
by the system was counted as "the original" and subsequent
contributions were treated as cases of plagiarism. So, for
example, I could go to (e.g.) Stanford and grab some document
from a web site there and upload it to the APS at ASU. It would
be given a clean bill of health. Anyone at ASU who uploaded a
similar document thereafter would be flagged as plagiarising my
"original contribution."
2. The APS did not monitor primary literature.
I went to PSYCHinfo and began to cut and paste from well-known to
famous experiments, published in various JEP journals. The APS
never complained and passed them all as being original contributions.
Also, I submitted sections from well-known reference works
without receiving complaints from the APS.
3. The APS did not monitor famous textbooks.
Here is where my students made their contributions. They
discovered that the APS would let them submit large sections from
various textbooks without being flagged.
Also, they discovered that the APS seemed to be biased towards
english-language sources. They submitted famous poetry and
song-lyrics from other languages without any hassle.
My conclusion was that the APS worked if students were using each
others papers on a particular campus or a few web sites.
Otherwise, the institution was paying for a lot of nothing.
Ken
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected]
Professor and Assistant Chairperson
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
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