more on Plagiarism? How to identify?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Jeremy Epstein <jeremy.epstein () webmethods com>
Date: June 28, 2005 9:02:48 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net, Ip ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Cc: george.sadowsky () attglobal net
Subject: RE: [IP] Plagiarism? How to identify?


Many high schools (and probably colleges) use turnitin.com, which  
looks for
overlapping text strings to texts in its database.  And it adds whatever
gets submitted to its database, thus increasing the chances over time  
for
true positives and false positives.  It has the risk of eventually  
becoming
the equivalent of 1000 monkeys at typewriters (computers?) writing
Shakespeare.

Turnitin played a starring role a few years ago in an ABC News  
documentary
about cheating in elite high schools.  As my daughter's high school  
was the
one profiled, I've been particularly interested in the results.  The  
story
reported that a very large fraction (I don't recall what it was) of all
papers were detected as including plagiarized material.  What the  
producers
didn't understand is the concept of false positives.  I asked my  
daughter
about her results with the program, and she said that it frequently  
said her
papers were plagiarized, because she quoted (with attribution) from  
sources.
Luckily, the teachers are smarter than the program, and didn't reject  
her
papers, since they could see that the "plagiarism" was in fact properly
cited.

The point of this, in light of the question posed by George Sadowsky, is
that even if Turnitin (or a similar system) says a particular paper is
plagiarized, that's no substitute for reviewing what it spits back.

--Jeremy


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