I'm deeply unsettled at this time of year by the information about "contract cheating" (buying term papers online) and how flagrant it is. Sometimes you are positive that a student didn't write the submitted paper (how can a D student, who can barely complete a sentence in an essay question, submit a strongly written research paper?) but we need more ways to prove it. I'm sure the essay companies do their best to help the students not get caught. (I've seen some that offer an essay written to a grade specification, so that a C student will get a paper that's not very well-written and with some words spelled incorrectly. *Sigh.*)
Does anyone know of any further little tricks to use with Word that can help us find these contract cheaters? I'd be particularly interested to know if there's a way to find out the TOTAL amount of time a student has spent on "writing" a paper - such as when the student began work on the paper. For example, if the student bought the paper from a term paper site, I'd expect that only a few minutes would be spent opening it up into a new document page, maybe adding his/her own name, etc. The information that I posted yesterday does tell the "last" time it was edited, and how much time was spent and how many "edits" were made. But this doesn't help if, say, the student worked on it for a week altogether, saved it, and then opened it one final time, etc. Then it might look like only few minutes were spent, which of course is very suspicious, but perhaps incorrectly so. Some of the tell-tale signs I've been using, as I described in yesterday's post, with Leah Adams-Curtis' tips, are in the Prepare->Properties link, which reveals the author's/owner's name. MOST of the time, this should be the student's name, but what if he/she is using someone else's computer to write the paper? That, in itself, shouldn't be incriminating. The other sign is under the pull-down menu for Document Properties->Advanced->Statistics, which reveals the editing information described above. But I KNOW that legal departments have other tricks they use to uncover "secret" notations that aren't intended to show up in the final documents. Anybody know what they might be, or any other detective tricks? 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=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=6989 or send a blank email to leave-6989-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
