High Tech Plagiarism

from the cheating-only-cheats-yourself dept

If you're a student, it's becoming much, much easier to plagiarze.. there are now several online sources where you can just go and buy term papers. In some cases, they'll write a fresh one for you. Well, schools are now starting to catch and punish these cheaters using software that detects similarities in students' work. Here's what I'm wondering -- given a class of 1000 students, I'm sure that many of them will have similar sentences, even exactly the same sentences (even if they weren't cheating).
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    another Mike, 14 May 2001 @ 7:00pm

    No Subject Given

    I heard a radio interview with the professor who found all this plagiarism. He used 6 identical words in a row as a marker to find suspiciously similar papers, and then checked them out to see if they were plagiarised. He determined that in almost all (though not all) the cases the suspicious papers were plagiarised. Pretty good idea actually.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Checker, 15 May 2001 @ 6:46am

    Similarities

    In fact people are quite easily identified from the way they write. Students will indeed have similar sentences, but only because they are quoting from other sources - and if they don't reference them properly then that is a problem. (or else they actually copying from someone)

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.