How to know the cheating students that use the copy and paste in thier research?

Question

Hey Im a teacher .
I need a way or a software to know that my students copy and paste the
research and assignments from the internet or any other source.
many thanks for you
[e-mail]

Answer 1

Hey i would love a program that does that too, so far i haven't found anything. For the most part i just google parts of my students' work that either don't fit with their style or doesn't sound right. I've even had some students forget to change the font after they cut and pasted the next text, so sometimes it's easy to figure out the parts that are not their original work. If you find an easier way let us all in on the secret! good luck.

Answer 2

I did a search and found this.....not sure how old it is though....

"The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age,"by Jamie McKenzie @ www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html

www.plagiarism.org is a useful Web site that scans student papers and produces reports highlighting
identical material found among millions of pages on the Internet. Other plagiarism detection sites include: http://plagiarism.com
for the "Glatt plagiarism Screening program", an interactive program that uses the student's own writing style. See also: www.wordchecksystems.com, and www.nocheating.com/default.asp


A Berkeley computer science professor has created a software program that can identify plagiarism in his programming courses called MOSS, Measure of Software Similarity @ www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html

Answer 3

Basically...You can use google. Take a phrase that doesn't seem likely to be written by your student, and paste it into the search engine. Sometimes it is extremely easy to see they copied it.

Answer 4

"Welcome to the new war in academe, where technology is the weapon for both cheaters and their academic overseers. As students increasingly pilfer papers off Web sites and online sources, professors are girding up with their own technologies to nab the culprits-in a sort of elegant collegiate game of mutually assured destruction....

And:

"Colleges clamp down on cheaters" (06/11)

"Schools get advanced tools to nab cheaters" (06/11)

By Karen Thomas, USA Today (both reports; portions combined here)

The nation's schools will be using the summer vacation to deploy a new breed of high-tech countermeasures to catch and prevent campus cheating.

Now, educators are battling back with an arsenal of high-tech countermeasures — anti-plagiarism software, biometrics (thumbprints and retina scanning) to ensure test-taker identity, among others — to help curb academic dishonesty.

This summer, thousands of universities nationwide are rolling out programs to detect student work that may have been copied from the Net or from other students' papers. High schools are putting into place computer technology that ensures that students using the Net for research are forced to cite their sources.

"There's a combination of technology tools and strategies that teachers have in their quivers now to offset the concern with cheating," says Don Knezek, director of the National Center for Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology, a division of the U.S. Department of Education.

Come fall, Georgetown University, UCLA, Wake Forest, Clemson and Tulane, among thousands of other colleges and high schools, will greet returning students with a number of cutting-edge tools to track down cheaters and discourage kids from cheating.

Included in the arsenal:

Web-based anti-plagiarism services. More than 1,800 schools plan this summer to deploy turnitin.com, which automatically compares term papers with text on the Internet and in publications. That's four times as many schools as have used it in the service's three-year history.

Cheat-proof software. More than 100 high schools and colleges next year will use Secureexam, tested in 19 schools including Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and the University of North Carolina last month. The software prevents cheating on computer-based tests by blocking students from using other applications, such as e-mail and Web browsers. Columbia University and thousands of elementary and secondary schools using McGraw-Hill textbooks will install software supplied by the publisher that embeds automatic footnoting whenever a student accesses source material on the Net.

Biometric IDs. Thumbprint scanners and digital cameras will be installed in national standardized testing centers to curb test-taker impersonations and monitor students.

"Professors need some help," says James Sandefur, chair of the honor council at Georgetown, where educators will decide in coming months whether all student work will be checked for plagiarism, or whether professors' discretion will determine which papers are scanned.

"Most school districts are looking aggressively for cheating-type software and interventions," says Heidi Rogers, president of the International Society of Technology in Education. "Most schools want to promote responsible and ethical use of technology."

This school year closes amid several high-profile scandals involving cheating by students. More than 120 students are under investigation for plagiarism at the University of Virginia, which has one of the nation's most rigorous honor codes.

Last month, more than 100 high school students in three schools in the Washington, D.C., area were required to retake an advanced-placement history exam after essay questions leaked out via the Net.

One department at UCLA tested an anti-plagiarism service this year. A scan of about 150 student papers and 1,000 lab reports at a cost of $1 each turned up "significant instances of plagiarism," says biochemistry professor Steve Hardinger, who ran the tests. It was enough to convince administrators. "Now we have a university commitment to do it next year."

Other schools are getting aggressive on campus with students, with software and services designed to detect plagiarized text. "Not only do we wish to battle plagiarism," says UCLA's Hardinger, "but also we'll be letting students know we're using the service, and we'll nip it in the bud — just don't do it."

Columbia University is among schools testing new software that automatically generates and permanently embeds Web addresses as footnotes every time students use information from the Net for school reports.


And:

The New York Times (6/28:G1,6)

"Lessons in the School of Cut and Paste"

By Katie Hafner

...Often, teachers are suspicious from the start. "if the student hasn't done a lick of work or produced anything during the stages of a research paper, then suddenly this beautifully typed-up paper materializes, that's a sign," said Cathy Aubrecht, an English teacher at....

...Dr. McCabe said he was deeply concerned about the cavalier attitude toward plagiarism among students coming up through high school and beginning to enter college....

...In high school, moreover, the consequences are not so grave as they are in college. High school students caught cheating are usually given a stern lecture or, at worst, a failing grade. On rare occaisions, seniors will not be allowed to graduate. College students caught plagiarizing, especially at institutions with strict honor codes, are often suspended and may even be expelled, Dr. McCabe said.

Dr. McCabe said he believed there was less cheating in college than in high school not only because of the consequences but also because students take college more seriously....

...At the same time, the web has made it much easier to catch plagiarists. A growing number of educators routinely use Web-based services for detecting unoriginal work.

Turnitin.com, a popular service, offers a simple method that allows both teachers and students to submit papers to electronic scrutiny. The service compares the paper against millions of websites, a database of previous submissions and papers....

...Dr. John M. Barrie, a founder of Turnitin.com, estimated that of all the work submitted to the site, nearly one-third is copied from another source....

...Such services are surprisingly effective, especially as a deterrent.

Dr. Steven Hardinger, a chemistry lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles, said he had students submit their own papers to Turnitin.com, with the results sent to him.

"The use of Turnitin.com as a deterrent is perhaps much more valuable than as a way to ferret out plagiarism," Dr. Hardinger said. "We really hate to see plagiarists and hate to punish them, but we want them to know we're watching."...



***Now, more and more often, teachers, professors and schools are determined to discourage students from cheating and to catch students who still cheat. Cheating simply is not a good idea."


Hate to say this, but, of course I cut and pasted the above. By the way, I'm a teacher, too.