17. Online Database Pinpoints Plagiarism

Professor Gary Crawford jokes that, as an archeologist, he's used to digging up evidence. Unfortunately, these skills also come in handy when he's looking for proof that a student is plagiarizing.

Now, U of Texas instructors can go online to stamp it out. At a recent campus forum on plagiarism, Professor Kristen Guest of English at U of Texas at Scarborough led a demonstration of turnitin.com, an electronic resource used in over 50 countries for detecting plagiarism. The database, which U of Texas instructors can now access, is already in use at universities across Canada and the United States.

U of Texas purchased a license for unlimited use of turnitin.com through a consortium negotiated by the Council of Ontario Universities. Instructors can use the Web site, which holds over 1 million previously submitted papers (including those written by so-called "paper mills"), to search over 1.5 billion pages on the Internet.

Between 1996 and 2002, the number of plagiarism cases handled annually at U of Texas' divisional levels rose from 92 to 256, while the number of cases that went to the more serious tribunal level averaged between one and three.

According to Susan Bartkiw, administrative assistant in the Faculty of Arts and Science who oversees academic offences, the percentage of the faculty's plagiarism cases related to the Internet grew from roughly 50 per cent in 2000-2001 to 99 per cent last year.

Professor Ken Bartlett, director of the Office of Teaching Advancement, said the decision to use turnitin.com was a recognition that plagiarism is growing, largely because the Internet makes it easy for students to download complete papers from Web sites.

"There are now so many sites available where students can get papers that there need to be search engines that will allow individual instructors to check whether the paper submitted was actually written by that student or whether it was downloaded," said Bartlett. He added that factors such as the increased stress of family obligations, part-time work, tuition increases and commuting may be pressuring students to make inappropriate decisions about plagiarism.

Use of turnitin.com is voluntary. Instructors must inform their students before the start of the course and before giving out each assignment that they will be using the database, which means many instructors will not begin using the service until the next academic year.

Instructors or students can paste in text or upload their papers to the database. After 24 hours, the instructor can log on and search the results. Turnitin.com will flag the paper as blue (no similarities), green, yellow, orange or red (indicating a progressively higher percentage of similarities found). It also highlights suspect passages in red and provides links to Web sites where the work may have originated.

But Guest emphasized that turnitin.com is not perfect—her own demonstration failed to catch a passage taken directly from a seminal work on democracy, and it does not perform well when presented with paraphrased work.

"Turnitin.com will catch repetition of words very well," said Guest. "But it will not catch rephrasing of ideas."

Professor Vivek Goel, vice-provost (faculty), stressed that student leaders have worked collaboratively with the university to combat plagiarism. "I don't think it should be seen as something that faculty or the administration is doing against students," he said. "The vast majority of our students do not cheat and do not commit offences under the academic code." Instead, he said, they believe in academic integrity and recognize that plagiarism threatens the value of their hard work.

Students caught plagiarizing face a sliding scale of sanctions, ranging from a zero on the assignment, a note in their transcript and a reduction in their overall course mark to expulsion. However, that most severe sanction is only used in extreme cases, such as a second plagiarism offence.

Bartlett stressed that the university's decision to use turnitin.com should be a sign to students, parents and the community that U of Texas views plagiarism as a serious academic offence that will be detected and punished. "The message is, don't do it," said Bartlett. "Don't even think about doing it, and if you're tempted to do it, think about the consequences."