Bob Jensen's Threads on Plagiarism Detection and Exam Cheating

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

Cartoon from Teachable Moments --- http://insidehighered.com/views/teachable_moments/cartoon0406

Where to Begin in When Trying to Detect Plagiarism 

Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools --- http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools: Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.

Combating Plagiarism: Is the Internet Causing More Students and Ministers to Copy 

Where is the line of ethical responsibility of using online services to improve writing?

Market for Admissions Test Questions and Admissions Essay "Consulting"

Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her dissertation? 
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course project, take home exam, or term paper? 

This service from Google Answers is disturbing.  

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) 

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education

Huge Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia, Ohio, Duke, and Other Universities 

Cheating Across Cultures

Plagio-riffing 

New Kinds of Cheating

Old Kinds of Cheating 

Did Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz Plagiarize?

Social/Cultural Construction of Cheating

Ghost Students on Campus 

Professors Who Let Students Cheat 

Professors Who Plagiarize

Professors Who Fabricate Research Outcomes

Celebrities Who Plagiarize/Cheat

Media Sources Who Let Journalists Cheat and Go Unpunished for Cheating
Plagiarism Goes Unpunished in the Liberal Press

In Defense of Cheating

MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own rules 

54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating

Academic Fraud for Athletes  

Scientists Behaving Badly  

Copyright Issues and Concerns 

Also see
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing 
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)

Copyright and Deep Linking  

100 Cases of Cheating at the University of Virginia 

Where to Begin in When Trying to Detect Plagiarism 

Adventures in Cheating:  A guide to Buying Term papers and Dissertations Online (What's a "virgin prostitute?" in this context?)

Plagiarism and 'Atonement'

Catching Cheaters with Their Own Computers

Guidelines for Copyrighted Material at Websites, Blackboard, and WebCT

Center for Academic Integrity --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/

Threads on the P2P, PDE, Collaboration, and the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet/BearShare/KaZaA/ --- 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on controlling online cheating --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

Bob Jensen's threads on onsite versus onsite assessment ---  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline

January 6, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

NEW JOURNAL COVERING PLAGIARISM IN THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY

The recently-launched, refereed INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY [ISSN 1833-2595] intends to provide a forum to address educational integrity topics: "plagiarism, cheating, academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university governance, and student motivation." The journal, to be published two times a year, is sponsored by the University of South Australia. For more information and to read the current issue, go to http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/IJEI .

 

Update Messages 

Candidates attempting to cheat in an exam by writing on a part of their body must be reported to the chief invigilator immediately. Please speak to an exam attendant who will contact the student administration office. Keep the students under close observation to ensure that they do not attempt to erase the evidence. The chief invigilator will arrange for a member of staff with a camera to come to the exam room to photograph the evidence to present to the examinations offences panel.
Signs on the walls of Student Administration Office at Queen Mary College in London, as reported by Abbott Katz, "Inside Higher Ed, May 31, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/31/katz

A World Class Athlete With World Class Ethics That Will Impact Upon Future Generations
He speaks his mind --- and apologizes later.  He loves to party --- and doesn't care about winning.  Yet Bode Miller is poised to strike Olympic gold.  On the slopes with skiing's bad boy,.
Bill Saporito. As written on the cover of Time Magazine, January 23, 2006 --- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1149374,00.html

Jensen Comment
Bode Miller is the best of the best in a sport where winners are determined by hundredths of a second on a stop watch.  His picture is on the cover of the January 23, 2006 edition of Time Magazine.  Although he's relatively unknown in his home country (U.S.A.), he's been an established hero in Europe where crowds chanted "Bode, Bode, . . . ." while he was on his way to winning the 2005 World Cup.  He's poised to become the Gold Medal hero in the 2006 and obtained recent U.S. notoriety due to a recent interview on Sixty Minutes (CBS television) in which he admitted that having fun is more important than winning and that he sometimes partied too much when skiing including a few instances when he was a bit tipsy or hung over when crashing down the slope at over 80 miles per hour.

Chagrined media analysts questioned whether the partying and outspoken Bode Miller was really a role model for our young people.  I contend that he is largely do to some things buried in the article in Time Magazine. After discussing his partying and independent nature, the article goes on to explain how Bode more than any other skier in history made a science out of the sport.  Most of his life has been spent studying and experimenting with every item of clothing and equipment, every position for every circumstance on the slopes, and the torques and forces of every move under every possible slope condition. That sort of makes him my hero, but what really makes him my hero is the following quotation that speaks for itself:

Last year, after tinkering with his boots, he discovered that inserting a composite --- as opposed to aluminum or plastic --- lift under the sole gave him a better feel on the snow and better performance.  Then he did something really crazy, he shared the information with everyone, including competitors.  His equipment team flipped, but in the Miller school of philosophy this makes complete sense.  Otherwise, he says, "I'm maintaining an unfair advantage over my competitors knowingly, for the purpose of beating them alone.  Not for the purpose of enjoying it more or skiing better.  To me that's ethically unsound."

One has to be reminded of the famous poem painted on the wall of my old Algona High School gymnasium:

For when the Great Scorer comes
To write against your name.
He marks -- not that you won or lost --
But how you played the game.
Grantland Rice --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantland_Rice

Setting a bad example for its students:  Plagiarized from Alabama A&M University
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools from revoking the accreditation of Edward Waters College while the institution pursues a due process lawsuit against the association.  In December, the regional accrediting group said that it had revoked the Florida college's accreditation, citing documents Edward Waters officials had submitted to the association that appeared to have been plagiarized from Alabama A&M University, another historically black institution.
Doug Lederman, "Staying Alive," Inside Higher Ed, March 14, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/staying_alive 

"Tolerance of Cheating: An Analysis Across Countries" --- http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/pdffiles/spring02/magnus.pdf 

Bob Jensen's threads on P2P file sharing are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

Forwarded by Chris Nolan on August 28, 2003

With a new academic year starting, I wanted to remind everyone of the following comprehensive webliography on plagiarism. Each entry is annotated, and each entry represents a document that is available on the Web:

http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism 

This Web site also has other guides to ethics issues on topical areas that you might wish to share with faculty in other departments on your campus:

Anthropology Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/anthroethics.htm

Art Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/artethics.htm

Bioethics: http://www.web-miner.com/bioethics.htm

Business Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/busethics.htm

Ethics Case Studies: http://www.web-miner.com/ethicscases.htm

History Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/historyethics.htm

Journalism Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/journethics.htm

Research Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/researchethics.htm

Sociology Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/sociologyethics.htm

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax: (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies@uillinois.edu 

Combating Plagiarism:  Is the Internet Causing More Students to Copy --- http://library.cqpress.com/images/cqres/pdfs/color/cqr20030919C.pdf 

This is a very comprehensive CQ Researcher edition dated September 19, 2003

THE ISSUES

775   Has the Internet increased the incidence of plagiarism among students?
          Should teachers use plagiarism-detection services?
          Are news organizations doing enough to guard against plagiarism and other types of journalistic fraud?

BACKGROUND

782   Imitation Encouraged
         Plagiarism had not always been regarded as unethical.

784   Rise of Copyright
         Attitudes about plagiarism began to change after the printing press was invented.

785   'Fertile Ground'
         Rising college admissions in the mid-1800s led to more writing assignments--and more chances to cheat.

786   Second Chances
         Some journalists who were caught plagiarizing recovered from their mistakes.

CURRENT SITUATION

787   Plagiarism and Politics
         Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., is among the politicians who got caught plagiarizing.

787   'Poisonous Atmosphere'
         Some journalists say news organizations overreacted following the Jayson Blair affair.

788   Action by Educators
         U.S. schools have taken a variety of steps to stop plagiarism.

OUTLOOK

790   Internet Blamed
         Educators and journalists alike say the Internet fosters plagiarism.

SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS

776   College Students Consider Plagiarism Wrong
         Ninety percent view copying as unethical.

777   How much Plagiarism?
         Plagiarism is probably on the rise, although it appears to have remained stable over the past 40 years.

779   Confronting Plagiarism Poses Risks
         Students sometimes challenge teachers who accuse them.

783   Chronology
         Key events since 1790.

784   Rogue Reporter at The New York Times
         Jayson Blair didn't fool everybody.

789   At Issue
         Should educators use commercial services to combat plagiarism?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

792   For More Information
         Organizations to contact.

793   Bibliography
         Selected sources used.

794   The Next Step
         Additional articles from current periodicals.

Question
Have you considered asking your students to turn in two term papers simultaneously, one of which is mostly plagiarized and one that is pledged to be not plagiarized in any way with proper citations?

"Winning Hearts and Minds in War on Plagiarism," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/plagiarism

That’s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second, they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that having the students “parrot back what we’ve told them” accomplishes anything. Her hope is that this unusual assignment might change that.

After the students turn in their two responses to the essay prompt, Hagopian shares some with the class. Not surprisingly, the students do know how to plagiarize — but were uncomfortable admitting as much. Hagopian said that the assignment is always greeted with “uncomfortable laughter” as the students must pretend that they never would have thought of plagiarizing on their own. Given the right to do so, they turn in essays with many direct quotes without attribution. Of course in their essays that are supposed to be done without plagiarism, she still finds problems — not so much with passages repeated verbatim, but with paraphrasing or using syntax in ways that were so similar to the original that they required attribution.

When she started giving the assignment, she sort of hoped, Hagopian said, to see students turn in “nuanced tricky demonstrations” of plagiarism, but she mostly gets garden variety copying. But what she is doing is having detailed conversations with her students about what is and isn’t plagiarism — and by turning everyone into a plagiarist (at least temporarily), she makes the conversation something that can take place openly.

“Students know I am listening,” she said. And by having the conversation in this way — as opposed to reading the riot act — she said she is demonstrating that all plagiarism is not the same, whether in technique, motivation or level of sophistication. There is a difference between “deliberate fraud” and “failed apprenticeship,” she said.

Hagopian’s approach was among many described at various sessions last week at the annual meeting of the Conference of College Composition and Communication, in New Orleans. Writing instructors — especially those tasked with teaching freshmen — are very much on the front lines of the war against plagiarism. As much as other faculty members, they resent plagiarism by their students — and in fact several of the talks featured frank discussion of how betrayed writing instructors feel when someone turns in plagiarized work.

That anger does motivate some to use the software that detects plagiarism as part of an effort to scare students and weed out plagiarists, and there was some discussion along those lines. But by and large, the instructors at the meeting said that they didn’t have any confidence that these services were attacking the roots of the problem or finding all of the plagiarism. Several people quipped that if the software really detected all plagiarism, plenty of campuses would be unable to hold classes, what with all of the sessions needed for academic integrity boards.

While there was a group therapy element to some of the discussions, there was also a strong focus on trying new solutions. Freshmen writing instructors after all don’t have the option available to other faculty members of just blaming the problem on the failures of those who teach first-year comp.

What to do? New books being displayed in the exhibit hall included several trying to shift the plagiarism debate beyond a matter of pure enforcement. Among them were Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, just published by the University of Michigan (and profiled on Inside Higher Ed), and Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies, released in February by Boynton/Cook.

Like Hagopian, many of those at the meeting said that they are focused on trying to better understand their students, what makes them plagiarize, and what might make them better understand academic integrity. There wasn’t much talk of magic bullets, but lots of ideas about ways to better see the issue from a student perspective — and to find ways to use that perspective to promote integrity.

Continued in article


 

 

A Clever Way to Punish and Prevent Plagiarism

"Traffic School for Essay Thieves," by Paul D. Thacker, Inside Higher Ed, November 29, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/29/plagiarism

Having grown weary of punishing students for plagiarizing and advising other professors to fail them, too, Meg Files said that she had an epiphany during a random chat with a colleague at Pima Community College’s West Campus. The professor explained that he had recently gone to traffic school after receiving a ticket and that the course had actually improved his driving.

“So I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a parallel program for plagiarism?’ ” said Files, who chairs Pima’s English/journalism department.

Seizing on the idea, Files created a “traffic school for plagiarism,” aimed at altering the campus’s focus on catching and punishing students for turning in essays they didn’t write. Now students can seek academic rehabilitation instead of punishment by participating in a plagiarism program that contains five steps:

Files, who will be overseeing the program, said that it is too early to tell whether it will be successful. Only a few students have elected to sign up, and none have yet finished.

“My reaction is, good for them,” said Donald L. McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. McCabe, a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University, called Pima’s approach a good policy that cuts down the middle between two extremes: excessively punishing students for literary piracy, or ignoring them. McCabe said that his own research finds that plagiarism is slightly more common today than in previous decades and that honor codes help curb the problem.

However, current policies at most educational institution revolve around detection and punishment. A number of universities now use online products such as Turnitin.com to scan essays for stolen text.

While catching students and then failing them for copying does help to reduce plagiarism, McCabe said that it probably doesn’t provide the best results and may just teach students to be more careful when they cheat. “Now we are just teaching students how to avoid detection,” he said.

Instructing students how to correctly reference other work and instilling a sense of academic integrity in them is difficult, McCabe said, but is the best way to dissuade students from plagiarizing.

“I like the focus — the remedial aspect instead of just playing gotcha,” said John P. Lesko, editor of the new scholarly journal, Plagiary. Lesko pointed out that some students may not even know that plagiarism is a bad thing, and that copying is considered normal in some countries.

He noted that Carolyn Matalene, now professor emeritus of English language and literature at the University of South Carolina, noticed in the 1980s that students in China regularly pilfered lines from published pieces. “She found that copying was actually encouraged so that you would learn like the masters,” he said.

Files said that cultural differences in defining plagiarism also drove her develop the new program. “In some cultures, plagiarism isn’t bad,” she said. But she also found that the current policies at her institution were not going far enough. In the past, Pima tried to curb plagiarism by assigning original topics, which makes it more difficult for students to purchase an essay, and by emphasizing the writing process—outlining, drafting, revising—over delivering a finished product. Finally, faculty have been encouraging students to be confident and proud of their own writing. She calls these steps “prevention” and the new program a “cure” once plagiarism is found.

“I think it’s a worthwhile effort, but the motivation to plagiarize is huge,” said Colin Purrington, associate professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College. Purrington became so concerned about the growing problem with plagiarism that he put up a complete Web site to address the issue a couple of years ago.

One of the resources he cites as a deterrent against plagiarism is an essay that a Swarthmore student wrote as a disciplinary measure after getting caught. The essay reads: “Plagiarism is undisputedly, a most egregious academic offense. Unfortunately, I found that out the hard way. I cannot even begin to describe how unpleasant the experience was for me.”

On his Web page, Purrington notes that the essay is nicely written and urges instructors to hand it out to students to generate discussion. But he also notes with some chagrin: “That person got caught again some years later.”

Question
who were at least two famous world leaders who plagiarized doctoral theses?

 

Answer
Two that I know of off the top of my head are Martin Luther King and Vladimir Putin. Doubts are raised that Putin ever read his thesis that plagiarized from a U.S. textbook. Iran's President Ahmadinejad allegedly plagiarizes, although I don't know if he plagiarized in his doctoral thesis --- http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/10/ahmadinejad_i_h.html
 

Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional
Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel, acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious." The book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books.
Dinitia Smith, "Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional," The New York Times, April 25, 2006 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Her Publisher is Not Convinced
A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous." On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of Random House, had been "unintentional and unconscious." But in a statement issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act." He said that there were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books."
Dinitia Smith, Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology," The New York Times, April 26, 2006 --- Click Here

April 27, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming [lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]

Unlike the purchase/pooling debate or derivatives, this one is something I know a fair bit about!

First, Harvard does not have an honor code, though they debated one in the 1980s. Nor does Harvard belong to the Center for Academic Integrity, despite the fact that most of the other Ivy Leagues, all the seven sisters except Radcliffe, and over 390 universities (including a few in Canada and Australia) do. That being said, the Harvard BUSINESS School does have a code, voted in overwhelmingly by its own students several years ago.

There is a tremendous variety in scope of honor codes. Some address only academic issues while others have broader coverage. I remember my senior year at Smith two fellow seniors were expelled during their final semester for putting sugar in the gas tank of another student. This was adjudicated under the honor code there. However other campuses would handle such a thing through their students affairs or residence life departments (or of course the police could be called in).

For those unfamiliar with honor codes, Melendez, McCabe & Trevino, and my papers have used these criteria for an honor code:

1. unproctored exams
2. some kind of signed pledge that students will not cheat
3. a peer judiciary
4. reportage requirements, i.e., students should not tolerate violations of academic integrity and have an obligation to report them

Any one or a combination of these criteria must be in place for a true honor code. McCabe's research has shown that honor codes cut cheating about in half.

The clearing house, if you will, for honor codes in place in the U.S. is the Center for Academic Integrity, at www.academicintegrity.org 

Now back to Bob's question, pretending it took place at a university with an honor code. Did this plagiarism take place in the context of coursework? I believe the answer in this case is no. Therefore it would depend on whether the honor code was written to encompass activities outside of class. Some codes would capture this incident under the general category of behavior that brings disrepute to the university (all sorts of things, including well-known athletes that behave in a drunken manner in public, debate teams that trash a hotel room, you name it). Others would have no jurisdiction in this case because it did not take place in class, nor did she do it as part of an organized university group or function.

Honor codes are a wonderful thing if students are socialized into accepting them early. They can really make cheating a major social gaffe, such that many students who might cheat elsewhere wouldn't take the risk. Perhaps this woman would not have committed this plagiarism if she had been at a university with an honor code culture. I still remember how unnerved I was (and perhaps how naive) when I was first a teaching assistant at LSU. I couldn't believe all the precautions, including leaving bags at the front, removing hats, spacing people apart, requiring photo identification on their desks, pacing the rows, etc. I had never even been proctored during an exam before, so it was really a culture shock!

I could go on and on, as this is a favorite topic of mine, but I'll save more for another day. :-)

Linda Kidwell

March 3, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ON PLAGIARISM

In January the University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office launched a refereed online journal, PLAGIARY. The purpose of the journal is "to bring together the various strands of scholarship which already exist on the subject, and to create a forum for discussion across disciplinary boundaries." Papers in the first issues include:

-- "The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story"

-- "Copy This! A Historical Perspective On the Use of the Photocopier in Art"

-- "A Million Little Pieces of Shame"

Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification [ISSN 1559-3096] is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet at http://www.plagiary.org/ . For more information contact: John P. Lesko, Editor, Department of English, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, MI 48710 USA; tel: 989-964-2067; fax: 989-790-7638; email: jplesko@svsu.edu 

 

"Technology and Plagiarism in the University: Brief Report of a Trial in Detecting Cheating," Diane Johnson et al., AACE Journal 12(3), 281-299 --- http://www.aace.org/pubs/AACEJ/dispart.cfm?paperID=24 

This article reports the results of a trial of automated detection of term-paper plagiarism in a large, introductory undergraduate class. The trial was premised on the observation that college students exploit information technology extensively to cheat on papers and assignments, but for the most part university faculty have employed few technological techniques to detect cheating. Topics covered include the decision to adopt electronic means for screening student papers, strategic concerns regarding deterrence versus detection of cheating, the technology employed to detect plagiarism, student outcomes, and the results of a survey of student attitudes about the experience. The article advances the thesis that easily-adopted techniques not only close a sophistication gap associated with computerized cheating, but can place faculty in a stronger position than they have ever enjoyed historically with regard to the deterrence and detection of some classes of plagiarism.

"Stolen Words," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, January 25, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/01/25/mclemee
But the topic of plagiarism itself keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of student plagiarism, forget it — who has time to keep up?

It was not that surprising, last fall, to come across the call for papers for a new scholarly journal called Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. I made a mental note to check its Web site again — and see that it began publishing this month.

One study is already available at the site: an analysis of how the federal Office of Research Integrity handled 19 cases of plagiarism involving research supported by the U.S. Public Health Service. Another paper, scheduled for publication shortly, will review media coverage of the Google Library Project. Several other articles are now working their way through peer review, according to the journal’s founder, John P. Lesko, an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, and will be published throughout the year in open-source form. There will also be an annual print edition of Plagiary. The entire project has the support of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan.

In a telephone interview, Lesko told me that research into plagiarism is central to his own scholarship. His dissertation, titled “The Dynamics of Derivative Writing,” was accepted by the University of Edinburgh in 2000 — extracts from which appear at his Web site Famous Plagiarists, which he says now gets between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors per month.

While the journal Plagiary has a link to Famous Plagiarists, and vice versa, Lesko insists that they are separate entities — the former scholarly and professional, the latter his personal project. And that distinction is a good thing, too. Famous Plagiarists tends to hit a note of stridency such that, when Lesko quotes Camille Paglia denouncing the poststructuralists as “cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents’ generations in Nazi France,” she seems almost calm and even-tempered by contrast.

“It seems that both Foucault and Barthes’ contempt for the Author was expressed in some rather plagiaristic utterances,” he writes, “a parroting of the Nietschean ‘God is dead’ assertion.” That might strike some people as confusing allusion with theft. But Lesko is vehement about how the theorists have served as enablers for the plagiarists, as well as the receivers of hot cargo.

“After all,” he writes, “a plagiarist — so often with the help of collaborators and sympathizers — steals the very livelihood of a text’s real author, thus relegating that author to obscurity for as long as the plagiarist’s name usurps a text, rather than the author being recognized as the text’s originator. Plagiarism of an author condemns that author to death as a text’s rightfully acknowledged creator...” (The claim that Barthes and Foucault were involved in diminishing the reputation of Nietzsche has not, I believe, ever been made before.)

To a degree, his frustration is understandable. In some quarters, it is common to recite – as though it were an established truth, rather than an extrapolation from one of Foucault’s essays – the idea that plagiarism is a “historically constructed” category of fairly recent vintage: something that came into being around the 18th century, when a capitalistically organized publishing industry found it necessary to foster the concept of literary property.

A very interesting argument to be sure — though not one that holds up under much scrutiny.

The term “plagiarism” in its current sense is about two thousand years old. It was coined by the Roman poet Martial, who complained that a rival was biting his dope rhymes. (I translate freely.) Until he applied the word in that context, plagiarius had meant someone who kidnapped slaves. Clearly some notion of literary property was already implicit in Martial’s figure of speech, which dates to the first century A.D.

At around the same time, Jewish scholars were putting together the text of that gigantic colloquium known as the Talmud, which contains a passage exhorting readers to be scrupulous about attributing their sources. (And in keeping with that principle, let me acknowledge pilfering from the erudition of Stuart P. Green, a professor of law at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, whose fascinating paper “Plagiarism, Norms, and the Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights” appeared in the Hastings Law Review in 2002.)

In other words, notions of plagiarism and of authorial integrity are very much older than, say, the Romantic cult of the absolute originality of the creative genius. (You know — that idea Coleridge ripped off from Kant.)

At the same time, scholarship on plagiarism should probably consist of something more than making strong cases against perpetrators of intellectual thievery. That has its place, of course. But how do you understand it when artists and writers make plagiarism a deliberate and unambiguous policy? I’m thinking of Kathy Acker’s novels, for example. Or the essayist and movie maker Guy Debord’s proclamation in the 1960s: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.” (Which he, in turn, had copied from the avant-garde writer Lautreamont, who had died almost a century earlier.)

Why, given the potential for humiliation, do plagiarists run the risk? Are people doing it more, now? Or is it, rather, now just a matter of more people getting caught?

Given Lesko’s evident passion on the topic of plagiarism as a moral transgression – embodied most strikingly, perhaps, in his color-coded War on Plagiarism Threat Level Analysis – I had to wonder if the doors of [ital]Plagiary[ital] would be open to scholars not sharing his perspective.

Was it worth the while of, say, a Foucauldian to offer him a paper?

“It may be that I’m a bit more conservative than some scholars,” he conceded. But he points out that manuscripts submitted to Plagiary undergo a double-blind review process. They are examined by three reviewers – most of them, but not all, from the journal’s editorial board.

There is no ideological or theoretical litmus test, and he’s actively seeking contributions from people you might not expect. “I’m willing to consider articles from plagiarists,” he said.

That’s certainly throwing the door wide open. You would probably want to vet their work pretty carefully, though.

Cheating then versus now
What this means in evaluative practice is not only that the opportunities to cheat (just to continue to use this word) are enormously expanded. The nature of cheating itself changes accordingly — to the despair of every teacher, beginning with those who teach freshman composition. The very fact that “plagiarism” must be carefully defined there defers to the absence of what the dean in (the movie) School Ties refers to as a vacuum. (Could cheating even be punished — in his terms — if one has to begin by defining it?) It also testifies to the near-impossibility of judging a paper on SUV’s or gay marriage or God-knows-what that has been cobbled together out of Internet sources whose fugitive presence, sentence by sentence, is almost undetectable. Furthermore, to the student these sources may well be almost unremarkable, with respect to his or her own words. What is this business of one’s “own words” anyway? What if the very notion has been formed by CNN? How not to visit its site (say) when time comes to write? Most students will be unfamiliar with a theoretical orientation that questions the whole idea of originality. But they will not be unaffected with some consequences, no less than they are unaffected by, say, the phenomenon of sampling and remixing as it takes place in popular culture, especially fashion or music.  “Plagiarism” has to contend with all sorts of notions of imitation, none of which possess any moral valence. Therefore, plagiarism becomes — first, if not foremost — a matter of interpretive judgment. Cheating, on the other hand, is not interpretive in the same way (and, in the world of (the movie) School Ties, not “interpretive” at all). No wonder, in a sense, that test gradually has had to yield to text. It is almost as if the vacuum could not hold. By the present time, the importance of determining grades (in part if not whole) by means of papers acquires the character of a sort of revenge of popular culture — ranging from cable television to rap music — upon academic culture.
Terry Caesar, "Cheating in a Time of Extenuating Circumstances," Inside Higher Ed, July 8, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/08/caesar
 

Jensen Comment:  The 1992 movie School Ties focuses on cheating brought to light by an honor code that requires students to report seeing other students cheat.  It also focuses on education at a time when cheating was more severely punished, usually by expulsion from school.  In most colleges today, first-time offenders who get caught are generally placed on some type of probation.  At the same time most schools have modified their honor codes in this litigious society such that students are no longer required to report observed cheating of other students.  Many instructors view reporting of cheating as becoming too much of a hassle in terms of time and trouble when the student will not be severely punished in any case.  This leads to greater risk taking on the part of some students when it comes to cheating.  They are less likely to be detected and, if detected for the first time, the punishments are negligible relative to the rewards.  Such risk taking continues on when they are tempted to cheat as executives in business/government and the temptations to siphon off millions of dollars are great.

From T.H.E. Newsletter on November 17, 2004

With the crunch of midterms, finding time to write that history paper or analyze that Shakespeare poem may seem like an impossible feat.

But students will want to think twice before running to the Internet to download a paper in times of desperation, as UCLA renewed its license this year for the commonly used online anti-plagiarism service, Turnitin.com…

For the full story, visit: http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=30809 

Ministers should learn that it is much more acceptable if attribution of source material is given up front
Glenn Wagner was a successful mega-church pastor in Charlotte, N.C., until one of his elders heard a sermon on the radio that was identical to one he had heard from the pulpit. Mr. Wagner confessed that he had been preaching other people's sermons off and on for two years, including some he broadcast on Christian radio. He resigned from his ministry last fall. A similar case occurred after members of the National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C., found on the internet sermons that Alvin O'Neal, moderator of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a celebrated preacher in that denomination, had preached. Mr. O'Neal apologized for his actions and remains in his ministry. A number of lesser-known ministers across the country have also been caught stealing sermons. Sometimes it makes the newspapers, but other times congregations or denominations handle the matter quietly.
Gene Edward Veith, "Word for word RELIGION: More and more pastors lift entire sermons off the internet—but is the practice always wrong?" World Magazine, April 22, 2005 ---
http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=10576

Question
Where are your students going for help with term paper assignments?

Answer
One place might be the "Term Paper Research Guide" at http://www.findarticles.com/p/page?sb=articles_guide_termpaper&tb=art 

"Hi-tech answer to student cheats," BBC News, June 30, 2004 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/wear/3852347.stm 

New measures to help detect cheating students are being demonstrated at a conference in Newcastle. 

A survey of around 350 undergraduates found nearly 25% had copied text from another source at least once.

A new service that can scan 4.5 billion web pages is now online so that lecturers can check the originality of the work submitted by students.

The software is being demonstrated at a meeting of the Plagiarism Advisory Service at Northumbria University.

'Originality report'

Student Tom Lenham said of the statistics: "That's a pretty modest interpretation of the situation at the moment.

"From my own experience and that of fellow students, it's a lot higher than that because it is not drummed into our heads from the start.

"Only more recently have we been told how to use the internet for referencing."

The Plagiarism Advisory Service says cheating is not a new phenomenon but the internet has led to concerns within the academic community that the problem is set to increase dramatically.

The service manager Fiona Duggan said: "The software has four databases that it checks students' work against and produces an originality report which highlights where it has found matches.

"It demonstrates where the student has lifted text from, and it also takes you to the source where the match was found."

The software has been developed in the USA and the Plagiarism Advisory Service hopes it will go some way to stamping out the practice.

Ms Duggan said: "There are other things that can be done, like the way you set assignments so each student has something individual to put into the assignment so it is not so easy to copy."

Questions
Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her dissertation? 
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course project, take home exam, or term paper?

Answer
Forwarded by Aaron Konstam
"Academic Frauds," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2003 --- http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/11/2003110301c.htm 

Question (from "Honest John"): I'm a troubled member of a dissertation committee at Private U, where I'm not a regular faculty member (although I have a doctorate). "Bertha" is a "mature" student in chronological terms only. The scope of her dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is substandard. The committee chair just told me that Bertha is hiring an editor to "assist" her in writing her dissertation. I'm outraged. I've complained to the chair and the director of doctoral studies, but if Bertha is allowed to continue having an "editor" to do her dissertation, shouldn't I report the university to an accreditation agency? This is too big a violation of integrity for me to walk away.

Answer: Ms. Mentor shares your outrage -- but first, on behalf of Bertha, who has been betrayed by her advisers.

In past generations, the model of a modern academician was a whiz-kid nerd, who zoomed through classes and degrees, never left school, and scored his Ph.D. at 28 or so. (Nietzsche was a full professor at 24.) Bertha is more typical today. She's had another life first.

Most likely she's been a mom and perhaps a blue-collar worker -- so she knows about economics, time management, and child development. Maybe she's been a musician, a technician, or a mogul -- and now wants to mentor others, pass on what she's known. Ms. Mentor hears from many Berthas.

Returning adult students are brave. "Phil" found that young students called him "the old dude" and snorted when he spoke in class. "Barbara" spent a semester feuding with three frat boys after she told them to "stop clowning around. I'm paying good money for this course." And "Millie's" sister couldn't understand her thirst for knowledge: "Isn't your husband rich enough so you can just stay home and enjoy yourself?"

Some tasks, Ms. Mentor admits, are easier for the young -- pole-vaulting, for instance, and pregnancy. Writing a memoir is easier when one is old. And no one under 35, she has come to suspect, should give anyone advice about anything. But Bertha's problem is more about academic skills than age.

Her dissertation plan may be too ambitious, and her writing may be rusty -- but it's her committee's job to help her. All dissertation writers have to learn to narrow and clarify their topics and pace themselves. That is part of the intellectual discipline. Dissertation writers learn that theirs needn't be the definitive word, just the completed one, for a Ph.D. is the equivalent of a union card -- an entree to the profession.

But instead of teaching Bertha what she needs to know, her committee (except for Honest John) seems willing to let her hire a ghost writer.

Ms. Mentor wonders why. Do they see themselves as judges and credential-granters, but not teachers? Ms. Mentor will concede that not everyone is a writing genius: Academic jargon and clunky sentences do give her twitching fits. But while not everyone has a flair, every academic must write correct, clear, serviceable prose for memos, syllabuses, e-mail messages, reports, grant proposals, articles, and books.

Being an academic means learning to be an academic writer -- but Bertha's committee is unloading her onto a hired editor, at her own expense. Instead of birthing her own dissertation, she's getting a surrogate. Ms. Mentor feels the whole process is fraudulent and shameful.

What to do?

Ms.Mentor suggests that Honest John talk with Bertha about what a dissertation truly involves. (He may include Ms. Mentor's column on "Should You Aim to Be a Professor?") No one seems to have told Bertha that it is an individual's search for a small corner of truth and that it should teach her how to organize and write up her findings.

Moreover, Bertha may not know the facts of the job market in her field. If she aims to be a professor but is a mediocre writer, her chances of being hired and tenured -- especially if there's age discrimination -- may be practically nil. There are better investments.

But if Bertha insists on keeping her editor, and her committee and the director of doctoral studies all collude in allowing this academic fraud to take place, what should Honest John do?

He should resign from the committee, Ms. Mentor believes: Why spend his energies with dishonest people? He will have exhausted "internal remedies" -- ways to complain within the university -- and it is a melancholy truth that most bureaucracies prefer coverups to confrontations. If there are no channels to go through, Honest John may as well create his own -- by contacting the accrediting agencies, professional organizations in the field, and anyone else who might be interested.

Continued in the article.

Why not hire Google to write all or parts of her dissertation dissertation? (See below)

November 3, 2003 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU] 

Bob, there are two very different questions being addressed here.

The first deals with the revelation that “her dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is substandard”.

The editing of a manuscript is a completely different issue.

The ambiguity of the research and the flaws with the proposal should be addressed far more forcefully than the editing issue!

Care should be used to ensure that the editor simply edits (corrects grammar, tense, case, person, etc.), and isn’t responsible for the creation of ideas. But if the editor is a professional editor who understands the scope of his/her job, I don’t see why editing should be an issue for anyone, unless the purpose of the dissertation exercise is to evaluate the person’s mastery of the minutiae of the English language (in which case the editor is indeed inappropriate).

Talk about picking your battles … I’d be a lot more upset about ambiguous research than whether someone corrected her sentence structure. I believe the whistle-blower needs to take a closer look at his/her priorities. A flag needs to be raised, but about the more important of the two issues.

David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University

Where is the line of ethical responsibility of using online services to improve writing?

June 23, 2006 message from Elliot Kamlet [ekamlet@STNY.RR.COM]

Is it just me or is there a lack of, at least, shame.

http://www.thepaperexperts.com/aboutus.shtml 

Elliot Kamlet
Binghamton University

June 23, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Elliot,

I suspect that paying to have your writing edited, revised, and translated is as old as writing itself. Networking technology has simply made it faster, easier, and in many instances cheaper.  What is a problem is that a student who writes very badly may never be discovered in college if writing is required only for assignments outside the classroom. This speaks in favor of essay examinations along the way.

There is certainly nothing illegal about an editing service, and it would be tough to say outside editing is unethical except for assignments that require or request that the author's work must be entirely in his/her own words.

Of course this particular service in Canada may entail both editing and translating (from Canadian into English) --- just kidding.

If such a service also adds new content, then the ethical issues are very clear since the author might take credit for the new content where credit is not due. The author also takes a chance that the new content might be plagiarized.

I had a student some years ago that submitted a term paper that was plagiarized entirely from three separate sources (that I found with a Google search). In dealing with the student and his parents, I discovered that he was not aware that his AIS paper was plagiarized. He was a young CEO of one of his father's AIS companies. He (my student) hired one of his employees to write the paper. The employee actually plagiarized the work to be submitted in the name of my student.

The question in this case is what is worse --- plagiarizing from published sources or hiring the writing of the term paper? In either case, the rule infraction would get the student an F from me and a report of the incident to the Academic Vice President of the University.

Interestingly, the student approached me about five years later and asked if the time limit on his F grade had expired. He wanted to submit a new paper. I told him that F grades do not expire even after graduation.

Bob Jensen

June 23, 2006 reply from Ruth Bender [r.bender@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]

And for $62.65 you can buy "Plagiarism and Academic Integrity"

"Plagiarism is a constant concern in the academic world particularly in areas that involve a lot of research or term paper writing, such as English Literature. The Internet seems to be making plagiarism easier as are companies that specialize in academic research writing for hire. However, several experts believe that most plagiarism takes place because students do not fully understand how to perform proper scholarly research and integrate it into their own material. In the end, plagiarism seems to stem more from a lack of knowledge rather than a plot to undermine education."

Pages: 7

Bibliography: Content-Di source(s) listed

Filename: 22017 plagiarism and Academic Integrity.doc

Price: US$62.65

Ruth Bender
Cranfield School of Management
UK

June 23, 2006 reply from Joseph Brady [bradyj@LERNER.UDEL.EDU]

Years ago I too thought that dishonesty was caused by a lack of knowledge. The cure: tell students the general rule (don't take credit for the work of others) and how that rule applies in your course (give specific examples of how students could trip up). I work hard at the cognitive factor, going so far as to give a *quiz* on our honesty rules, in the first week of classes.

Experience can be a cruel teacher. I now think that most students are dishonest because it's easy to be dishonest and easy to get away with dishonesty. The problem is not a cognitive one. It's an ethical one, having a grounding in what is culturally acceptable at an institution.

It's not a problem in just English 101. Plagiarism is a serious issue in any course that involves computer-generated files. It's easy in any MIS or AIS course to copy someone else's application program and make some simple modifications to avoid detection. Students learn this right away. Actually, they have know this since high school or even earlier.

My primary concern as an educator is: are students learning? Surely this is obvious: those who are copying, are not learning. If only the small minority of students were at fault, I would not worry so much. But I think the problem is worsening rapidly. It's now possible to reach a tipping point: most of the class copying most of the time, so that not much is learned by the end of the semester. I actually had a section that came pretty close to that status last semester.

Students will not police themselves, at least not here, so I do not have a solution for the problem. It would be nice to have a utility (like turnitin.com) that would answer the question: "Was the contents of this Excel/Access/VB/etc file copied or imported from some other file?" You can no longer get the answer to that question reliably using Windows time stamping. One of my summer To-Do's is to write that program in VB, but I'll have to learn a lot about Windows file structures to do that, and I'll probably not have time to get to it.

Joe Brady
University of Delaware

June 25, 2006 reply from Robert Holmes Glendale College [rcholmes@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a cheater.

June 25, 2006 reply from Henry Collier [henrycollier@aapt.net.au]

I am more than a little vexed with this:

It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't think it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a cheater.

There’s more than one cultural bias illustrated in the quote. Not everyone, fortunately, is embedded in the narrow and biased views of the writer.

Henry

June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Throughout the world in modern times I think borrowing works without proper citation is considered unethical. In some parts of the world such as Germany there was (and possibly still is) an exception made for students where the work of the student was viewed as the work of the professor. I'm not certain about this exception in modern times, but some professors in the past purportedly put their names on entire books written by students without even acknowledging the students. Presumably these professors also kept the book royalties with clear consciences. I think this practice was more common in the physical sciences.

A exception which does still exist in modern times arises when a noted professor, often a senior researcher from a highly prestigious university, lends his/her name to a textbook to improve its marketing potential. I know of one instance in an accounting textbook with four authors where one of the authors wrote over 90% of the material and the other authors mostly lent their names and affiliations. I know of other instances where a senior professor from a huge program did very little of the writing of the textbook but greatly increased the chances that his university would provide sales of over 1,000 copies of the book each year. Such marketing ploys might be viewed as deceptive, although can it be called plagiarism when the principal author of possibly 100% of the writing encourages someone else to share in the "authorship credit?"

Something similar happens for journal articles to improve their chances for publication in a leading journal. There is also the even more common happening where one author who writes poorly did the research and wrote a very rough first draft. Then a highly skilled writer who does little or no research anymore performs a great editing service and receives full credit as a partner in the research. In this case the paper's editor may be getting far more credit for the "research" than is deserving.

See how complicated the question of authorship ethics becomes.

Bob Jensen

June 26, 2006 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

>June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

>Throughout the world in modern times I think borrowing works without proper citation is considered unethical.

Bob, while this might hold true for academic work, it certainly does not seem to apply to the journalistic world, does it? (Think: WV Coal Mine Disaster; Think: Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans Stadium; Think: any one of hundreds of other media screwups in the past few months where so-called "news" media reported a story as though the reporter were reporting first-hand facts when in reality the reporter was "copying" from an unreliable (and false) source, -- all without proper citation.

And in some instances, a few journalists are so unethical that they even go so far as to try to HIDE their sources and keep them secret! Talk about lack of proper attribution! Some even claim a constitutional right to do so! ;-)

And no, the citation of "a reliable source" is not proper citation; if you think it is, just try getting one of those past ANY reviewer for any decent journal! I can see it now: a bibliography containing sixteen entries of "A reliable source", "ibid".

On another note, I have it "from a reliable source" that in times past, (specifically the 16th century art world), it was not considered wrong to borrow works from other people without attribution. (My source here is the art curator at the Rubens House museum in Antwerp, Belgium.) Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyke, and most of the other great "masters" of the art world back then ran studios to train young artists in the guild craft. The master would sketch a scene, the young artist would paint it, the master might touch up a little here and there, and ultimately would sign it, giving the student no recognition or attribution whatsoever. With the master's signature, the piece would sell handsomely, the master would pay the student a cut, and keep the rest. This was a widely known, and perfectly acceptable, practice of the day. There are dozens of Van Dykes, Rembrandts, Rubens, and other great works which show very little evidence of ever being touched by the person who signed the painting. Everyone of the day actually knew it, but it was an acceptable practice as long as the student was a student of the master. It was the master's name which sold the painting. Marketing, marketing.

Of course, to be realistic, I tend to agree with Robert Holmes. Most of the college students I encounter these days do know perfectly well that what they are doing is wrong in most cases, but plead ignorance and invoke the "cultural victim" mentality when caught. And when I do have the occasional student from another culture, I make an extra effort to clarify what is and is not acceptable. (I don't know what the culture is in Ghana, for example, but when caught, my Ghana student admitted knowing she had violated the honor code, in addition to violating the instructions clearly printed on the assignment.)

But as Carol pointed out, the chase, the hunt, the hiding, is all part of the game which some students see as being part of the "essence" of preparing for the real world: college.

signed,

---

(um, you were expecting a real signature here?)

---

The gadfly from JMU An unnamed source...

June 26, 2006 reply from Bernadine and Peter Raiskums [berna@GCI.NET]

In the doctoral program I am now pursuing on-line through Capella, the learners are provided with access to mydropbox.com and encouraged to submit their draft papers "to help with citation issues and improper source referencing. After submission, mydropbox.com will generate a plagiarism report within 24 hours ... for your personal use." I found the report to be very interesting in that it picked up something that had been published in a rather obscure journal which I had written myself last year!

Bernadine Raiskums, CPA, M.Ed. in Anchorage

The home page for mydropbox.com is at http://www.mydropbox.com/

Market for Admissions Test Questions and Essay "Consulting"

"In Lawsuit, College Board Accuses Company of Circulating Copyright-Protected SAT Questions,"  by Elizabeth R. Farrell,  Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2008 --- Click Here

A test-preparation company in Texas is being sued by the College Board for what it calls "one of the largest cases of a security breach in our company's history," according to Edna Johnson, a senior vice president of the nonprofit group, which owns the SAT.

In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Dallas, the College Board is seeking unspecified damages against the company, Karen Dillard's College Prep LP, which it says illegally obtained copies of SAT and PSAT tests before they were available to the public. The lawsuit also accuses the company of violating copyright-protection laws by circulating and selling materials that included test questions owned by the College Board.

The lawsuit arose after a former employee of the test-preparation company reported information to the College Board. Karen Dillard, the owner of the company, said the employee was disgruntled but would not elaborate on why.

Ms. Dillard did not deny that one of her employees obtained a copy of the SAT that was administered in November 2006 before the test was given. But Ms. Dillard said her company did not use any questions from that test in preparatory materials it provided to clients.

The lawsuit states that the employee got the test from his brother, the principal of a high school in Plano, Tex. The principal has been put on paid leave while the Plano school district investigates the matter, according to the Associated Press.

Copyright Confusion

In reference to the copyright allegations in the lawsuit, Ms. Dillard said in an interview on Friday that she had believed she was lawfully allowed to use materials she had purchased from the College Board before 2005.

Part of the confusion may stem from a shift in the College Board's policies regarding circulation of previous test materials. Until 2005, the company would sell copies of previously given SAT's to companies. After the SAT was revamped that year, the College Board no longer sold those materials. At that time, the company also began to offer its own online test-preparation course to students, which now costs $69.95.

"We believe part of the motivation of the College Board in bringing this lawsuit," Ms. Dillard said, "is to drive test-preparation companies like ours out of business so they can dominate the industry with their own test-preparation materials, which are for sale."

Ms. Dillard said she also thinks that the College Board is going to great efforts to publicize the lawsuit to make an example out of her company. To support that point, she said that Justin Pope, a higher-education reporter for the Associated Press, received a copy of the lawsuit and contacted her for comment before it was filed.

When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Pope said he could not confirm how or when he received the lawsuit, and could not comment further about the matter.

The lawsuit is the culmination of a four-month investigation by lawyers for the College Board. Two lawyers from the firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, along with a representative for the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, visited Ms. Dillard's office several months ago.

Ms. Dillard said that, at that time, her company fully cooperated with all requests for information and interviews with employees, and that she also provided personal financial records to the lawyers.

Ms. Dillard also said that her company offered to settle the matter for $300,000, but that lawyers for the College Board made a counteroffer of $1.25-million, a sum her company could not afford.

Ms. Johnson, of the College Board, said she could not comment on any offers made in settlement negotiations.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

I wonder if admissions officers are puzzled when two or more essay submissions look suspiciously alike?

"B-Schools Take on Essay Consultants," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher Ed, February 6, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/07/bschool

“Vault is collecting successful admissions essays for top MBA programs, including Wharton — and will pay $40 for each main essay (main personal statement greater than 500 words), and $15 for each minor essay (secondary essay answering a specific question less than 500 words) that we accept for our admissions essay section.”

That message, recently sent out from a top company that helps students get into business schools, is enough to irk even the most experienced admissions officers at some the nation’s leading business schools.

“Some of our admissions counselors have gotten outraged,” says Thomas R. Caleel, director of MBA admissions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We want students to be giving their real stories, not some ‘polished’ or even ‘over-polished’ versions of themselves.”

“Essays have to be meaningful per person,” he adds. “It might be helpful to see some successful essays, but in my mind, it might also be limiting. Someone might read one [of the consultant-produced essays] and think that their essays have to read the same way, in order to get in.”

Those sentiments are being expressed by an increasing number of business school officials who say that students shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to make themselves appear different than who they really are. While some officials plan to go on the offensive against firms that they find particularly egregious, others want to work more closely with consultants. Still others say that there is little they can do to prevent the phenomenon.

Deans at seven of the top American business schools are expected to address such issues at an upcoming gathering, according to a Monday report in The Boston Globe. In an effort to “remove the possibility of outside interference,” Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the paper that deans are considering making students complete their essays under supervision, providing different essays to students in the same applicant pool, and conducting more interviews and follow-up with references.

While the proliferation of admissions consultants of various sorts has frustrated officials in undergraduate admissions as well, especially at elite institutions, the steps being considered by business schools could amount to a much more aggressive stance against the application-consulting industry.

“Part of getting the best candidates is for them to be themselves during the admissions process,” says Caleel. “We really want to get to know the real person who is applying.” Wharton’s business school dean, Patrick Harker, is expected to be part of the group that will meet to discuss consultant issues.

While Vault officials could not be reached for comment on Monday, Alex Brown, a senior admissions counselor at ClearAdmit, in Philadelphia, says that not all consulting firms function the same way. “Some businesses are bad,” he says, “but the bulk of us, that’s not the way we operate.”

Continued in article

 

This service from Google Answers is disturbing.  

Students can now pay to have their homework answered by experts.

Some claim using the Net to do homework shows that today's kids are resourceful. But a rise in content cribbed straight from online sources, like Google Answers, has teachers on alert.
"Thin Line Splits Cheating, Smarts," vy Dustin Goot, Wired News, September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html 

Most teachers wouldn't be surprised to hear that students have bribed friends or siblings to do their homework in exchange for a few bucks.

What might surprise them is that Google Answers sometimes takes school kids up on the offer.

Staffed by a cadre of 500-plus freelance researchers, the service takes people's questions -- for example, a calculus problem or a term paper topic -- and provides answers and links to information. Google charges a listing fee of 50 cents and, if someone comes up with a satisfactory response, the user pays that researcher a previously entered bid (minimum: $2).

Although Google Answers has a policy encouraging students to use the service as a study aid rather than a substitution for original work, several cases show that students often ignore this advice.

One student in Quebec, dismayed by a response that offered only background research for a paper on religion, pleads, "Make it into an essay, not just links and quotes. I need this asap PLEASE!!! 2500 words is the minimum."

While researchers are scrupulous enough not to churn out a completed term paper -- despite the Quebec student's $55 bid -- other potential homework questions, such as math or science problems, can be harder to identify. In some cases researchers acknowledge that a question looks like homework -- but they still provide the answer.

The dilemma faced by Google Answers researchers highlights a broader issue that vexes many educators around the country. Namely, where do you draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate uses of the Internet and how do you stamp out clear abuses such as cutting and pasting entire paragraphs into an essay?

The question first entered many educators' consciousness following a Kansas cheating scandal earlier in the year that made national headlines. At Piper High School, near Kansas City, a biology teacher failed 28 of 118 students for plagiarism on an assignment that consisted of collecting and gathering information about local leaves.

However, many students (and their parents) contended that there was nothing improper about the leaf descriptions they submitted, which had been lifted straight from the Internet. Others claimed it was unclear where proper citation was required.

Tamara Ballou, who is helping implement an honor code at her Falls Church, Virginia, high school, said that it is not uncommon for teachers and students to disagree on what constitutes academic dishonesty.

"We took a long time to define cheating," she said, noting that many kids felt it was acceptable to copy homework from each other or off the Internet if the assignment was perceived as "busy work."

"A lot of kids don't even know what (plagiarism) is," agreed Kevin Huelsman. "They say, 'Yeah, I did the work; I brought it over (from the Internet).'"

Continued at  http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html 

See also:
•  Where Cheaters Often Prosper
•  Got Cheaters? Ask New Questions
•  Schools, Tech: Still Struggling

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) 

Faculty are reluctant to take action against suspected cheaters. In a 1999 survey of over 1,000 faculty on 21 campuses, one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the last two years, did nothing to address it. Students suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that faculty members are likely to ignore cheating.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI) --- See below

Academic honor codes effectively reduce cheating. Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over 12,000 students on 48 different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student involvement in the control of academic dishonesty. Serious test cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI) --- See below

The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/ 

The Center for Academic Integrity is affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. We gratefully acknowledge their financial and programmatic assistance, as well as funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

CAI is a consortium of over 225 institutions who share with peers and colleagues the Center’s collective experience, expertise, and creative energy.

Benefits of membership include:

Research --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp 

Research projects conducted by Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI), have had disturbing, provocative, and challenging results, among them the following:

Read about the honor codes of many colleges and universities --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/samp_honor_codes.asp 

Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education

July 30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu] 

NEW BOOK OF ONLINE EDUCATION CASE STUDIES

ELEMENTS OF QUALITY ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C. Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness, blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp. You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.

COMBATING CHEATING IN ONLINE STUDENT ASSESSMENT

In "Cheating in Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VII, no. II, Summer

2004) Neil C. Rowe identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously" and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:

-- Getting assessment answers in advance

It is hard to ensure that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.

-- Unfair retaking of assessments

While course management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.

-- Unauthorized help during the assessment

It may not be possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online test.

You can read the entire article, including Rowe's suggestions to counteract the problems, at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/summer72/rowe72.html.

The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.

SOCIAL INTERACTION IN ONLINE LEARNING

Among the reasons Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that "students often have less commitment to the integrity of distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education. In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online learners:

1. The use of synchronous communication

"Chat-rooms and other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."

2. The introduction of a forming stage

"Discussion on almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,

etc.) can be utilized by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is essential to any successful online experience."

3. The adherence to effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course web site."

The complete article is online at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/7_3/8.html.

Educational Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.

The International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.

......................................................................

ONLINE COURSES: COSTS AND CAPS

Two articles in the July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and "How many students can we have in a class?"

In "Online Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.

 

In "Online Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp. 43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.

Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax: 650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/ for more information.

Bob Jensen's threads on distance education in general are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

 

Huge Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia, Ohio, Duke, and Other Universities

Cheating Scandal in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University
In the biggest cheating scandal ever at Duke University’s business school, 34 students are facing penalties for collaborating on exam answers, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported. Nine students face expulsion, while others face a range of penalties, including one-year suspensions from the MBA program.
Inside Higher Ed, April 30, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/30/qt
The ABC News account on May 1, 2007 is at http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3105733

"Duke MBAs Fail Ethics:  Test Thirty-four Fuqua School of Business students are accused of violating the school's honor code by cheating on an exam,"  by Alison Damast, Business Week, April 30, 2007 --- Click Here  

Cheating on the Rise

Business-school leaders have reason to be concerned. Fifty-six percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past academic year, compared to 47% of nonbusiness students, according to a study published in September in the journal of the Academy of Management Learning & Education (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/24/06, "A Crooked Path Through B-School"). Donald McCabe, the lead author of the study and a professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School, says the large number of students implicated in the Duke case is above average. "It's certainly not the biggest, but it's one of the bigger ones," he says of academic scandals involving all kinds of students.

One of the larger cases in the past five years was a cheating scandal in a physics class at the University of Virginia in 2002. The school eventually dismissed 45 students and revoked three graduates' degrees. In 2005, Harvard Business School rejected 119 applicants accused of hacking the school's admissions Web site (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/9/05, "An Ethics Lesson for MBA Wannabes").

The Duke occurrence came to light in mid-March, when the professor for the class noticed some unusual consistencies among students' answers on the final exam and as well as on assignments given during the course.

Stiff Penalties

The students were brought before the school's Judicial Board and are facing a range of wide range of punitive measures, including expulsion. The board is made up of three faculty members, three students, and one nonvoting faculty chair who only votes in case of a tie.

Thirty-eight students were initially investigated, only four of whom were found not guilty of violating the honor code. (Of the 38 students, 37 were accused of cheating and one of lying.) Of the remaining 34 students, 9 will be expelled, 15 will be suspended for one year and receive an F in the class, and the remaining 9 will receive an F in the course. The penalties for the students will not go into effect until June 1, after which students will have 15 days to file an appeal. The school did not release the names of the students involved or name the professor.

Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor who is chair of the Fuqua Honor Committee, said in a written summary of the board hearings that the board spent several weeks "deliberating at length" the circumstances of the case. "It is my utmost hope that all of the individuals found guilty of violating our Honor Code will learn how precious a gift honor and integrity is," he wrote. "I know from my interactions with many of them that they will forever be changed by this experience."

Academic Pressures

The faculty and student body at Duke were informed of the committee's decision on the afternoon of Apr. 27, and the news spread throughout the campus and on Internet chat groups. Charles Scrase, Fuqua's student body president, was surprised by the charges: "The classmates I work with on a day-to-day basis are ethical, outstanding individuals," he says. "We're shocked that [cheating] could've occurred to this degree."

Sonit Handa, a first-year Fuqua student, suggests the students involved in this case might have been tempted to cheat because they wanted to ensure they did well in the class: "Duke is a hectic MBA business school, and employers want good grades, so there's a lot of pressure to do well."

The pressure, of course, is not confined to Duke. Many