Digital Plagiarism
Essay and test management software
I have recently started using plagiarism detection software. Not so much for the ability to detect plagiarism as for the essay submission- and grading- management capabilities it offered. Years ago I moved all my examinations and tests from paper to course management software (WebCT originally, now Blackboard, and soon Moodle). I discovered in my first year using that software that simply delivering and correcting my tests on-line—i.e. without making any attempt to automate any aspect of the grading—reduced the time I spent marking exams by an immediate 50%: it turned out that I had been spending as much time handling tests (sorting, adding, copying grades, etc.) as I had marking them—more, in fact, if you included the in-class time lost to proctoring and returning corrected work to students.
I long wondered whether I could capture the same kind of efficiencies by automating my essay administration. Here too, I thought that I spent a lot of time handling paper rather than engaging with content. In this case, however, I was not sure I would be able to gain the same kind of time-saving. While I was sure that I could streamline my workflow, I was afraid that marking on screen might prove much less efficient than pen and paper—to the point perhaps of actually hurting the quality and speed of my essay-grading.
My experience this semester has been that my fears about lack of efficiency in the intellectual aspects of my correction were largely unfounded. And that my hopes for improving my administrative efficiency closely reflected the actual possibilities. The amount of time I spend handling a given set of essays has now dropped by approximately the expected 50%. While marking on screen is slower than marking with a pencil (a paper that used to take me 20 minutes to mark now will take 24 to 25 minutes), the difference is both smaller than I originally feared and more than compensated by the administrative time-savings, again including the class time freed up from the need to collect and redistribute papers.
Detecting plagiarism
Although I use it primarily for essay management, plagiarism dedection software such as turnitin, the system I use, was, of course, originally designed to detect plagiarism—which means that I too can use it to check my students’ originality. The developers remind users that a lack of originality is not the same thing as plagiarism: plagiarism is a specific type of lack of originality and even good pieces of work will have numerous passages in common with other texts in the software’s database. Obvious examples of this include quotations from works under discussion and bibliographic entries. It is also quite common to see the occasional short phrase or clause flagged in otherwise original work, especially at the beginning of paragraphs or in passages introducing or linking quotations. Presumably there are only so many ways of saying “In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen writes…”. In shorter papers, in fact, it is not unusual to see non-plagiarised student papers with as much as 30%-40% of their content flagged initially as being as “non-original.”
Some students, however, actually do plagiarise—which I understand to mean the use of arguments, examples, or words of another as if they were one’s own. When marking by hand, I’ve generally considered this to be a relatively small problem. In twelve years at the University of Lethbridge, I’ve caught probably less than ten students whose work was significantly plagiarised. Obviously I’ve never been able to say whether this was because my methods for discovering such work were missing essays by more successful plagiarists or because the problem really wasn’t that significant. Using plagiarism detection software gave me the opportunity of checking how well I had been doing catching plagiarists the old fashioned way, when I was marking by hand.
To the extent that one semesters’ data is a sufficient sample, my preliminary conclusions are that the problem of plagiarism, at least in my classes, seems to be more-or-less as insignificant as I thought it was when I graded by hand, and that my old method of discovering plagiarism (looking into things when a paper didn’t seem quite “right”) seemed to work.1 This past semester, I caught two people plagiarising. But neither of them had particularly high unoriginality scores: in both cases, I discovered the plagiarism after something in their essays seemed strange to me and caused me to go through originality reports turnitin provides on each essay more carefully. I then went through the reports for every essay submitted by that class (a total of almost 200), to see if I had missed any essays that turnitin’s reports suggested might be plagiarised. None of the others showed the same kind of suspicious content that had led me to suspect the two I caught. So for me, at least, the “sniff test” remains apparently reliable.
How software improves on previous methods of detecting plagiarism
Even though it turns out that I apparently can still rely on my ability to discover plagiarism intuitively, there are two things about plagiarism detection software that do mark an improvement over previous methods of identifying such problems by hand. The first is how quickly such software lets instructors test their hunches. In the two cases I caught this semester, confirming my hunch took less than a minute: I simply clicked on the originality report and compared the highlighted passages until I discovered a couple that were clearly copied by the students without ackowledgement in ways that went beyond reasonable use, unconscious error, or unrealised intellectual debt. Working by hand would have required me to Googling specific phrases from the paper one after the other and/or go to the library and to find a print source for the offending passages. In the past it has often taken me hours to make a reasonable case against even quite obvious examples of plagiarism.
The second improvement brought on by plagiarism detection software lies in the type of misuse of sources it uncovers. Although I became suspicious about the originality of the two papers I caught this semester on my own rather than through the software’s originality report, the plagiarism I uncovered from the originality report was in both cases quite different from anything I have seen in the past. Instead of the wholesale copying from one or two sources I used to see occasionally when I marked by hand, the plagiarism I found this year with turnitin involved the much more subtle use of unacknowledged passages, quotations, and argument and at key moments in the students’ papers. In the old days, my students used to plagiarise with a shovel; these students were plagiarising with a scalpel. I’m not completely sure I would have been able to find the sources for at least some of this unacknowledged debt if I had been looking by hand.
A new kind of plagiarism
This is where my title comes in. It is of course entirely possible that students always have plagiarised in this way and that I (and many of my colleagues) simply have missed it because it is so hard to spot by hand. But I think that the plagiarism turnitin caught in these two essays this semester actually may represent a new kind of problem involving the misappropriation of sources in student work—a problem that has different origins, and may even involve more examples of honest mistake, than we used to see when students had to go to the library to steal their material. Having interviewed a number of students in the course of the semester, I am in fact fairly firmly convinced that what turnitin found is a symptom of new problems in genre and research methodology that are particularly to the current generation of students—students who are undergoing their intellectual maturation as young adults in a digital culture that is quite different from that of even five years ago. What they were doing was still culpable—the great majority of my students were able to avoid misappropriating other peoples’ ideas in their essays. But new technologies, genres, and student approaches to note-taking are making it easier for members of the current generation to “fall into” plagiarism without meaning to in ways that previous generations of students would not. In the old days, you had to positively decide to plagiarise an essay by buying one off a friend or going to the library and actually typing text out that you were planning to present as your own. Nowadays, I suspect, students who plagiarise the way my two students did this semester do so because they haven’t taken steps to prevent it from happening.
Digital students, the essay, and the blog
This first thing to realise about how our students approach our assignments has to do with genre. For most (pre-digital) university instructors, the essay is self-evidently the way one engages with humanistic intellectual problems. It is what we were taught in school and practiced at university. But more importantly, it was almost exclusively how argument and debate were conducted in the larger society. The important issues of the day were discussed in magazines and newspapers by journalists whose opinion pieces were also more-or-less similar to the type of work students were asked to do at the university: reasoned, original, and polished pieces of writing in which a single author demonstrated his or her competence by the focussed selection of argument and supporting evidence. The value of a good essay—at the university or in the newspaper—lay in the author’s ability to digest arguments and evidence and make it his or her own: find and assimilate the most important material into an original argument that taught the reader a new way of understanding the information and opinions of others.
For most contemporary students, however, the essay is neither the only nor the most obviously appropriate way of engaging with the world of ideas, politics, and culture. Far more common, certainly numerically and, increasingly, in influence, is the blog—and making a good blog can often involve skills that are anathemetic to the traditional essay. While it is possible to publish essays using blog software, the point of blogs, increasingly, is less to digest facts and arguments than to accumulate and react to them. Political blogs—like the Ed Morrisey’s Captain’s Quarters (now at Hot Air, or Dan Froomkin’s (Whitehouse Watch)—tend to consist of collections of material from other on-line sources interspaced with opinion. The skill an accomplished blogger brings to this type of material lies in the ability to select and organise these quotations. A good blog, unlike a good essay, builds its argument and topic through the artful arrangement and excerpting of usually verbatim material passages from other people’s work—in much the same way that some types of music are based on the original use and combination of digitised sound samples from earlier recordings.
In other forums this method of “argument by quotation” is the norm: every video worth anything on YouTube has at least one response—a companion video where somebody else picks up on what the original contributor has done and answers back, usually with generous visual or verbal quotation. Professional examples include the various Barack Obama tributes that were a defining feature of the 2008 Democratic Primary in the U.S. (examples include the work of Obama Girl= and will.i.am= ). But amateur examples are also extremely common—as was the case with the heavy amateur response to the question of whether the “(lonelyGirl15)” series of 2005 was actually a professional production.
The real evidence of the evolving distinction between the essay and the blog as methods of argumentation and literary engagement, however, can be seen in the blogs that newspapers are increasingly asking their traditional opinion columnists to write. It is no longer enough to write essays about the news, though the continued existence and popularity of the (on-line and paper) newspaper column shows that there is still an important role for this kind of work. Newspapers (and presumably their readers) also now want columnists to document the process by which they gather the material they write about—creating a second channel in which they accumulate and react to facts and opinions alongside their more traditional essays. Among the older journalists, an example of this is Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times, who supplements his column with a blog and other interactive material about the subjects he feels most passionate about. In his column he digests evidence and makes arguments; in his blog he accumulates the raw material he uses to write his columns and presents it to others as part of a process of sharing his outrage.
In the case of our students, the problem this generic difference between the blog and the essay causes is magnified by the way they conduct their research. On the basis of my interviews, it appears to me that most of my first year students now conduct their research and compile their notes primarily by searching the Internet, and, when they find an interesting site, copying and pasting large sections of verbatim quotation into their word processor. Often they include the URL of this material with the quotations; but because you can always find the source of a passage you are quoting from the Internet, it is easy for them to get sloppy. Once this accumulation of material is complete, they then start to add their own contribution to the collection, moving the passages they have collected around and interspacing them with their opinions, arguments, and transitions.
This is, of course, how bloggers, not essayists, work. Unfortunately, since we are asking them to write essays, the result if they are not careful is something that belongs to neither genre: it is not a good blog, because it is not spontaneous, dynamic, or interactive enough; and it is not a good traditional essay, because it is more pastiche than an original piece of writing that takes its reader in an new direction. The best students working this way do in the end manage to overcome the generic mismatch between their method of research and their ultimate output, producing something that is more controlled and intellectually original than a blog. But less good students, or good students working under mid- or end-of-term pressure, are almost unavoidably leaving themselves open to producing work that is, in a traditional sense at least, plagiarised—by forgetting to distinguish, perhaps even losing track of the distinction, between their own comments and opinions and those of others, or by collecting and responding exclusively to passages mentioned in the work of others rather than finding new and original passages that support their particular arguments.
This is still plagiarism: it is no more acceptable to misrepresent the words and ideas of others as your own in the blogging world as it is in the world of the traditional essay. And in fact it is more invidious that the older style of plagiarism that involved copying large chunks out of other people’s work: in the new, digital plagiarism, the unackowledged debt tends to come in the few places that really matter in a good essay: the interesting thesis, the bold transition, the surprising piece of evidence that make the work worth reading. Because it is so closely tied to new genres and research methods, however, this type of plagiarism may also have as much a cultural as a “criminal” motivation. In preventing it, instructors will need to take into account the now quite different ways of working and understanding intellectual argument that the current generation of students bring with them into the classroom.
Advice to the Digital Essayist
So how can the contemporary student avoid becoming a Digital Plagiarist?
The first thing to do is realise the difference between the essay and the blog. When you write an essay, your reader is interested in your ability to digest facts and arguments and set your own argumentative agenda. A blog that did not allow itself to be driven by current events, incidents, and arguments in its field of endeavour—whether this is an event in the blogger’s personal life or the ebb and flow of an election campaign—would not be much of a blog. Essays are not bound by this constraint, however: they can be about things nobody is talking about and make arguments that don’t respond to anybody. Even when, as is more normal and probably better, essays do engage with previous arguments and topics that are of some debate, the expectation is that the essayist will digest this evidence and these opinions and shape the result in ways that point the reader in new directions—not primarily to new sources, but rather to new claims and ideas that are not yet part of the current discourse.
The second thing to realise is just how dangerous the approach many students take to note-taking is in terms of inviting charges of plagiarism. In a world of Google, where text is data that can be found, aggregated, copied, and reworked with the greatest of ease, it is of course very tempting to take notes by quotation. When people worked with paper, pens, and typewriters, quotation was more difficult and time-consuming: when you had to type out quotations by hand, writing summaries and notes was far quicker. Nowadays, it is much easier and less time-consuming to quote something than it is to take notes: when you find an interesting point in an on-line source, it uses far fewer keystrokes (and less intellectual effort) to highlight, copy, and paste the actual verbatim text of the source in a file than it does to turn to the keyboard and compose a summary statement or not. And if you are used to reading blogs, you know that this method can be used to summarise even quote long and complex arguments.
There are two problems, however. The first is that this method encourages you to write like a blogger rather than an essayist: your notes are set up in a way that makes it easier to write around your quotations (linking, organising, and responding to them) than to digest what they are saying and produce a new argument that takes your reader in unexpected directions.
The second problem is that it is almost inevitable that you will end up accidentally incorporating the words and ideas of your sources in your essay without acknowledgement. It is easy, in reworking your material, to drop a set of quotation marks, or to start paraphrasing something and then end up editing it back into an almost verbatim quotation—without realising what you’ve done. And it is even easier to get sloppy in your initial note-taking—forgetting to put quotation marks around passages you’ve copied or losing the source URL. Once you add your own material to this collection of quotations in the file that will eventually become your essay, you will discover that it is almost impossible to remember or distinguish between what you have added and what you got from somebody else.
One way of solving this is to change the way you take notes, doing less quoting and more summarising. Doing this might even help you improve the originality of your essays by forcing you to internalise your evidence and arguments. But cutting and pasting from digital sources is so easy that you are unlikely ever to stop doing it completely—and even if your do, you are very likely to run into trouble again the moment you face the pressure of multiple competing deadlines.
A better approach is to develop protocols and practices that help you reduce the chances that your research method will cause you to commit unintentional plagiarism. In other words to find a way of working that allows you to keep doing the most important part of what you currently do (and are going to continue to do no matter what your instructors say), but in a fashion that won’t lead you almost unavoidably into plagiarising from your sources at some point in your career.
Perhaps the single most important thing you can do in this regard is to establish a barrier between your research and your essay. In a blog, building your argument around long passages of text that you have cut and pasted into your own document is normal and accepted; in essay writing it isn’t. So when you come to write an essay, create two (or more) files: one for the copying and pasting you do as part of your research (or even better, one file for each source from which you copy and paste or make notes), and, most importantly, a separate file for writing your essay. In maintaining this separate file for you essays, you should establish a rule that nothing in this file is to be copied directly from an outside source. If you find something interesting in your research, you should copy this material into a research file; only if you decide to use it in your essay should should you copy it from your research file into your essay file.In other words, your essay file is focussed on your work: in that file, the words and ideas of others appear only when you need them to support your already existing arguments.
An even stricter way of doing this is to establish a rule that nothing is ever pasted into your essay file: if you want to quote a passage in your text, you can decide that you will only type it out by hand. This has the advantage of discouraging you from over-quoting or building your essay around the words of others—something that is fine in a blog, but bad in an essay. If this rule sounds too austere and difficult to enforce, at least make it a rule that you paste nothing into you essay before you have composed the surrounding material—i.e. the paragraph in which the passage is to appear and the sentence that is supposed to introduce it. Many professional essayists, especially those who learned to write before there were word-processors, actually leave examples and supporting quotations out of their earliest drafts—using place holders like “{{put long quotation from p35 here}}” to represent the material they are planning to quote until they have their basic argument down.
Another thing you could try is finding digital tools that will make your current copy-and-paste approach to note-taking more valuable and less dangerous. In the pre-digital era, students often took notes on note cards or in small notebooks. They would read a source in the library with a note card or notebook in front of them. They would begin by writing basic bibliographic information on this card or notebook. Then, when they read something interesting, they would write a note on the card or in the notebook, quoting the source if they thought the wording was particularly noteworthy or apt. By the time they came to write their essays, they would have stacks of cards or a series of notebooks, one dedicated to each work or idea.
There are several ways of replicating (and improving on) this method digitally. One way is to use new word-processor files for each source: every time you discover a new source, start a new file in your word-processor, recording the basic information you need to find the source again (URL, title, author, etc.). Then start pasting in your quotations and making your notes in this file. When you are finished you give your file a descriptive name that will help you remember where it came from and save it.
Using your word-processor for this method will be cumbersome (you’ll spend a lot of time opening and closing files), difficult to use when you come to write (in a major essay you might end up with tens of files open on your desktop alongside the new file for your essay), and difficult to oversee (unless you have an excellent naming system, you will end up with a collection of research files with cryptic sounding names of which you have forgotten the significance). And if you can’t remember the specific source of a given quotation or fact, it will be hard to find later without special tools or opening and closing each file.
But other tools exist that allow you to implement this basic method more easily. Citation managers such as Endnote or Refworks, for example, tie notes to bibliographic entries. If you decide to try one of these, you start your entry for a new source (i.e. the equivalent of your paper notebook or note card) by entering it in the bibliographic software (This will also allow you to produce correctly formatted bibliographies and work cited lists quickly and automatically later on when you are ready to hand in your paper in). You then use the “notes” section as the place for pasting quotations and adding comments and notes that you might want to reuse in your paper. There is no problem with naming files (your notes are all stored under the relevant bibliographic entry in a single database), with moving between sources (you call up the each source by the bibliographic reference), and in most cases you will be able to use a built in search function to find passages in your notes if you forget which particular work you read them in.
Bibliographic databases and citation managers are great if all your notes revolve around material from text-based sources. But what if you also need to record observations, evidence, interviews, and the like that cannot easily be tied to specific references? In this case, the best tool may be a private wiki—for example at PbWiki (or if you are computer literate, and have access to a server, a private installation of MediaWiki, the software that runs the Wikipedia).
We tend to think of wikis as being primarily media for the new type of writing that characterises collaborative web applications like the Wikipedia or Facebook. In actual fact, however, wikis have a surprising amount in common with the notebooks or stacks of note cards students used to bring with them to the library. Unlike an entry in citation management software, wiki entry pages are largely free-form space on which you can record arbitrary types of information—a recipe, an image (more accurately a link to an image rather than the image itself), pasted text, bibliographic information, tables of numerical data, and your own annotations and comments on any of the above. As with an index card, you can return to your entry whenever you want in order to add or erase things (though a wiki entry, unlike an index card preserves all your original material as well), or let others comment on. And as with note cards you can shuffle and arrange them in various different ways depending on your needs—using the category feature, you can create groupings that collect all the pages you want to use in a given essay, or that refer to a specific source, or involve a particular topic. Of course unlike notes cards which had to be sorted physically, wiki entries can simultaneously belong to more than one grouping; and because they are stored in a database, you can search your wiki automatically, looking for passages and ideas even if you don’t remember where you saw them.
However you decide to solve this problem, the most important thing is to avoid the habit which is most likely to lead you into (unintentionally) plagiarising from your sources: starting an essay by copying and pasting large passages of direct quotation into the file that you ultimately intend to submit to your instructor. In an essay, unlike a blog, the point is to hear what you have to say.
1 I now take back the claim that this is as insignificant as I thought. In the year-end papers, I found a surprisingly large number of papers with plagiarised passaged in them (five or six out of sixty with perhaps one or two doubtful cases). At the same time, a paper-by-paper review of the originality reports still seems to confirm that one can rely on one’s hunches—I’ve not yet found plagiarism in a paper that didn’t seem right as I was reading it. The larger number of hits is coming from the ability turnitin is giving me to check my hunches more easily and quickly, The pattern I describe above of writing between large quotations and paraphrases still seems to be holding true, however—as is the age or generational difference: my senior students are not nearly as likely to write essays like this.
Comment [6]
Scott Catledge (Wed Jan 21, 2009 (08:54:45)) [PermLink]: I use digital sources whenever and wherever I can. I start with an outline. To avoid unintentional plagiarism while I am cutting and pasting, commenting, and summarizing, I print out all my digital files that I am using for citations or ideas. That way, I can double check to ensure that I have given proper credit for ideas as well as wording. At times, I come across an idea in print that I have already had; in those cases, I give credit only if I cite text on that idea. I am not averse to printed sources; however, I must get whatever I need through ILL, which takes time and often, money. One library wanted $200 for an overseas ILL; I wrote the author in Catalonia and got all I needed from him personally.
plagiarism checking (Mon May 11, 2009 (06:43:54)) [PermLink]: Choosing An Online Plagiarism Detector To Check For Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a growing problem in academia and the work place. The internet has made it easy for nearly anyone to copy written material and pass it off as their own work. Because of the legal and ethical dilemmas associated with plagiarism, plagiarism checking software is now readily available. With so many online plagiarism detectors, choosing one may seem like an overwhelming task, but it can be easy if you know what you’re looking for.
Jason Blake (Mon Jan 18, 2010 (04:38:16)) [PermLink]: Let’s not be too paranoid here!
Fools’ old way of copying and pasting the whole thing isn’t working any more!
You, as a student, must be clever to use the resources without been caught!
Take five different resources, mix them together by taking two sentences each paragraph each resource, rearrange them by describing an essay idea with different essay expression! change as many words with their equals as you can!
write down the five resources as references.
This method will fool any plagiarism detector, and will confuse your tutor!
What you know? may be you will really get a new authentic essay!dan (Mon Jan 18, 2010 (19:50:54)) [PermLink]: Jason,
You might be right—though I suspect that a couple of sentences in a row would get caught, based on what I’m seeing (I once found a paper in which every sentence was verbatim from somewhere, but the student had mixed them up so that no two adjacent ones were from the same source—seemed a bizarrely labour-intensive way of avoiding labour). But that’s a ton of effort for what could just as easily be research for an original paper.Jason Blake (Tue Jan 19, 2010 (06:41:37)) [PermLink]: You’re right if I copy them literally! like the example you gave, but there are three steps to apply:
1- different sources.
2- mix them.
3- change the words.
let us say I want to write about “the pronunciation of Old English”, and I will use your research along with another one
The introduction should be:
“The sounds of Old English should not prove difficult, with a few exceptions, for speakers of Modern English”
“It is obvious that we cannot have direct, first-hand knowledge of the pronunciation of a language which no-one speaks any more.”
If I use them as they are; that will be a clear plagiarism, but if we apply the three steps; it’ll be something different:
“The pronunciation of a dead language like the Old English is not difficult, although we don’t have a primary source of the sounds of Old English.”This example sounds it needs some effort! but what if I use technology! The problem (if it’s really one) with my three steps plan is laying in the future, where a simple program can do the three steps: using sources from search engines, mixing them using punctuation, changing words using dictionaries, and pass them through plagiarism detector to make sure everything is alright (how ironic!).
All you have to do is review the final outcome, and make it human writing alike!
that sounds evil! but what if I jot down my own genuine ideas, and ask the program to do the rest?!
This problem isn’t hypothetical! Actually, we are already facing it with ESL students, and the use of Google translate when they are asked to translate a paragraph!To sum-up, there are three things, we should think about:
1- You need to fool yourself before trying to fool others!
2- Where is the line between plagiarism and using them as only sources?!
3- Where does the technology stand, and how can we use it properly?dan (Tue Jan 19, 2010 (13:07:07)) [PermLink]: Neat (and ironic) example: clever original research to show how you can plagiarise. I like it very much!
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