Indeed, contract plagiarism is extremely difficult to detect. One tool that could be helpful with these cases is using The Cloze test (take the paper, white out key terms, and give it to the student to fill in the blanks). However, you would have to have been suspicious to begin that the papers were not legitimate. Moreover, there is no agreement as to what scores would indicate plagiarism. I have used it a couple of times and in one of those instances I got voluntary confession because the student could not fill in a single blank space correctly.
Miguel ----- Original Message ----- From: "Beth Benoit" <[email protected]> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 12:04:31 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [tips] Contract cheating Robert Clarke sent me information he found and the results were quite startling. I think he's "on" these sites, looking for this kind of thing. Absolutely without question, as the student entered the title of the paper she needed as well as the feedback I'd given only to her about how to proceed with her paper. That's the biggest problem...it seems that the only way we might be able to catch these students is to be moles in their systems.... Beth Benoit On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Paul Bernhardt < [email protected] > wrote: How did you discover the paper was from a contract site? Thanks! Paul Bernhardt Dept of Psychology Frostburg State University pcbernhardt _at_ frostburg _dot_ edu On Jun 17, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Beth Benoit wrote: I've recently been involved in a case of "contract cheating," where a student bought her research paper for my class from a term paper-writing site and was discovered. (She actually contracted for three different papers from three different courses - that we know of.) I think it's much more common than we'd like to believe. This has gotten me very interested in the issue of contract cheating and how it can be detected. (Short answer: Not easily.) For obvious reasons, the plagiarizing sites won't work for this. They compare a student's work to other published works, and since these paper-writing sites typically sell made-to-order papers, there's a different kind of deception involved, because the student is handing in an original paper. It just wasn't written by him/her. Of course, sometimes the purchased paper is plagiarized from an original work, but that's probably from the cheaper companies, not from the more upstanding (tongue-in-cheek) organizations like http://www.non-plagiarized-termpapers.com/ ! One of the experts on this is Robert Clarke, from Birmingham City University, England. He's actually the one who alerted me to my student's deception. (Here's information about contract cheating and Clarke and his colleague, Thomas Lancaster are described: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_cheating . ) Here's a summary of their findings: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/assessment/plagiarism/cheat_plagiarism.html And here are slides presented at a workshop: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/events/presentations/682_Private%20Life%20Annotated.pdf I think we all need to be aware that this is fast becoming a huge problem. If a student graduates from one of our institutions but clearly doesn't "know his/her stuff," it reflects poorly on the institution. And it makes me furious. Especially when I see the individualized feedback - which I gave to a student on her proposal - posted on the paper-writing site to give extra help to the person who's going to write her paper for her. Beth Benoit Granite State College Plymouth State University New Hampshire --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] . To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13441.4e79e96ebb5671bdb50111f18f263003&n=T&l=tips&o=3149 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-3149-13441.4e79e96ebb5671bdb50111f18f263...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] . To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13105.b9b37cdd198e940b73969ea6ba7aaf72&n=T&l=tips&o=3152 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-3152-13105.b9b37cdd198e940b73969ea6ba7aa...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] . To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13482.917fac06d4daae681dabfe964ca8c74e&n=T&l=tips&o=3154 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-3154-13482.917fac06d4daae681dabfe964ca8c...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- 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=3155 or send a blank email to leave-3155-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
