For papers there are many software methods to determine if someone is plaigarizing. However, this is very time consuming if you input every student's info. Therefore, I concentrate on ones that appear out of order. For example if a student has discussions usiong slang and has poor grammar and all of a sudden has a perfect paper. This gives me a warning light that maybe I should check it out.
I read this some years ago in an article that was part of the online training that I was taking. Sorry but I don't remember the article source.
Wow, those numbers are a little frightening. This is the first that I have heard of it. Do you recall where you read this John?
Cheating is more prevalent in residential. I recall reading an article where statistics showed that 60% of entering freshmen consider cheating as collaborating and not wrong. What amazed me was that if in strait for succeeding 60% considered it stupid not to cheat. The future doesn't look good for society with people thinking like this.
Thanks for your comments. Do you think cheating is more prevelant in online learning than residential?
I teach math so the Turnit service isn't going to work. In essence if I notice that the structure of thier response is identical in sparse wording it is a flag for comparing the homeworks. One clear evidence of cheating is when their work involves a maturity beyond the course level in the response. I can't prevent cheating just like I can't prevent birds from flying - what I can do is catch the bird (cheater) in the act.
I'm about to teach my first class, so what follows is speculation. I hope at least a small part of it survives contact with actual students. (And this is not the first time I've expressed this thought.)
Ultimately cheating is undetectable. In the online environment that's clear. As a thought experiment, the student could give his/her username and password to a hired ringer, and I as the instructor would have no way to tell. But doing something as extreme as that is costly. And unlikely. More likely is that the student will rely on friends and family, and maybe try to plagiarize. Since I teach math, plagiarism may not be a big concern. Relying on the work of others is.
I suspect that the major method for detecting cheating is to note inconsistencies in the students abilities. Particularly, if discussion, especially real time chat, is significantly poorer than turned in assignments that suggests there may be a problem. Another indicator may be widely varying assignment quality, perhaps because the help was used on one but not the other. A third indicator is the kind of errors made may be different. Now none of these is proof of cheating, but should it be suspected, there are procedures to follow to investigate, but I don't see how that could be definitively resolved. Plagiarism may be found and sometimes pretty well proved, but proving that you had someone sitting with you and helping seems very hard to do.
There's another problem in detecting cheating as well. The line is not particularly sharp between a student seeking help to learn the material and a student overdoing that and thereby beginning to get into the area of claiming the work of another. There are some grey areas here.
And cheating a big issue because:
- the student isn't learning the course material
- the student is misrepresenting himself or herself
- the grade is no longer a true assessment, damaging my institution's credibility and good name
You are right, unethical behavior happens everywhere, unfortunately. Because it is assumed that it is easy to cheat on your online class, online learning has struggled with establishing credibility. Fortunately, I think there are enough students and teachers that take online learning seriously and are dedicated to learning and teaching in this format.
I make every effort to detect plagiarism, such as using TurnItIn and looking for writing style changes. I also have the solutions to the assignments in the courses I teach that can be purchased from online sites, such as BrainMass.com. Plagiarism cheapens everyone's education because when graduates get to the workforce, they will be unable to complete the tasks expected of them as college graduates, giving the university a bad reputation. Furthermore, students who plagiarize have character flaws that may lead them to behaving unethically, and perhaps illegally, a signficant issue in business, and particularly, in finance.
That is a good tip Adam. Thanks for sharing it with our group.
Hello Dania-
I believe I know what tool you are referring to. I do not accept scores of higher than 25% without penalty. If their orignality verification score is less than 25% great and no points are taken off. If it is higher depending on what the score is I will either knock points off for not enough orignal content or make them redo it. If there is lack of in-text citation and the OV score is very high like over 55% it may be plaigarized and take the next steps that my school has in place for plaigarized work.
I will be teaching a visual online course where students will be submitting individual designs based on the software they are learning. While there is no online tool to detect plagerism of a visual nature (other than your own eyes!), I keep digital copies of all student work as when there are similarities between designs I ask the students to complete an assignment in real time so I can assess their skillset.
I haven't worked with the tool that you are referring to so I don't think I can answer your questions. Has anyone else on the discussion used such a tool and could answer Dania's questions?
The truth is we can never truly be sure if the students are completing the work for themselves. However, one of the tools we use in our online environment is a "similarity score" - the higher the score, the more likely it is not original work. It also cites the potential source it is most similar to. My question is: how high of a similarity score warrants the student having to re-submit, eg is it 70%? And if the score is 90-100% similar, do I take this as a "teaching moment" to help with learning to paraphrase better? I have done this the first time it happens, but the second time, I feel less inclined to do so, and more inclined to believe it is an act of plagiarism.
To prevent cheating, I try to equip students with a multitude of sources to draw information from and explain things several different ways to help ensure that the material is so understandable that they feel confident about answering questions and assignments in their own way. I try to make myself as available as possible to help if they are confused by the material.
I agree that students sometimes struggle with what plagiarism is and in many cases do not even realize they are doing it. Spending time working with the students to teach them what plagiarism is and how not to do it is a great idea.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how use the plagiarism detectors as teaching tools? That is certainly intriguing to me.
By the way, I didn't mention it before, but the way students generate their own data is through online laboratory simulations. There are some really good online labs out there. Because they each have unique data, there really can't be any cheating on the analysis part. If they collaborate, I don't mind. Because collaboration is a good skill. They still must understand in order to do the analyses properly, and understanding is what we really would like to evaluate.
There is a difference between cheating and plagiarism, which many of the previous posts do not address. While plagiarism is a serious offense in itself, it can be intentional or unintentional. Based on the students that I have worked with, about 80% of them, do not have the skills to write well right away. They often cite material wrong and do not paraphrase enough. I do not consider this cheating since the students are attempting to do the work on there own. As an instructor this is a perfect "teaching moment". Tools like Turn It In detect similiarity, which does not always mean plagiarism. It is up to the instructors to differential them.
In an all online environment, it is very hard to tell if students are doing the work themselves. If the student typically does not receive good grades and then improves drastically, it creates questions in my mind such as how is the student improving so much and what happened in the past that he/she was not submitting work of the same quality.
I think discussing academic honesty is important to cover in any class. While the university that I work at does not have an honor statement, I feel that students who have to write on the paper that they certify that it is his/her own will help. Often times, as instructors we have to take the word of the students that it is his/her own unless we have concrete evidence that it is not.
The tools can help you detect plagiarism. However, they do not detect plagiarism themselves. If students cite the information correctly, the tools cannot pick up on that. The tools can also be great teaching tools since it they can show students where they may need to paraphrase better or synthesize material more.
Yes, I am sure a future Bill Gates of the world can create a great system to deal with this specific challenge for online learning!
