Ken, thank you very much for sharing your experiences with plagiarism detection. Your efforts mirror, in part, those reported in a 2003 presentation at EPA from former TIPSter Miriam Joseph who compared Google’s search abilities with those of a major APS . My recollection is that both tools’ ability to find plagiarism was roughly equivalent, with Google actually having a slight edge over the APS .
That neither most APSs nor Google can enter the invisible web (i.e., pass-protected databases) is a major drawback of these tools. Turnitin does have a spin off, ithenticate, http://www.ithenticate.com/ , which is targeted to professional journal and book publishers and is associated with another service, CrossCheck, http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck.html , which does have access part of the invisible web. However, I believe that Turnitin does not yet tap those databases that are accessible to Ithenticate even thought they are owned by the same parent company, iParadigms. Thus, if students are taking material from journal articles which can only be accessed via a password, the material will not be flagged –at least not the first time it is submitted. Miguel ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Steele" <[email protected]> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 2:22:45 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [tips] Using SafeAssign [Now anti-plagiarism service issues] [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 --------------------------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=1513 or send a blank email to leave-1513-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
