High Tech Plagiarism
from the cheating-only-cheats-yourself dept
If you’re a student, it’s becoming much, much easier to plagiarze.. there are now several online sources where you can just go and buy term papers. In some cases, they’ll write a fresh one for you. Well, schools are now starting to catch and punish these cheaters using software that detects similarities in students’ work. Here’s what I’m wondering — given a class of 1000 students, I’m sure that many of them will have similar sentences, even exactly the same sentences (even if they weren’t cheating).
Comments on “High Tech Plagiarism”
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I heard a radio interview with the professor who found all this plagiarism. He used 6 identical words in a row as a marker to find suspiciously similar papers, and then checked them out to see if they were plagiarised. He determined that in almost all (though not all) the cases the suspicious papers were plagiarised. Pretty good idea actually.
Similarities
In fact people are quite easily identified from the way they write. Students will indeed have similar sentences, but only because they are quoting from other sources – and if they don’t reference them properly then that is a problem. (or else they actually copying from someone)