Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Up to 14% of Australian University Students May Be Plagiarizing From Web, Study Suggests By ANDREA L. FOSTER Up to 14 percent of Australian university students may be pirating material off the Internet for their essays, according to a study commissioned by six Australian universities. The study used a U.S.-based plagiarism-detection service called Turnitin.com to analyze 1,925 essays, each provided by a different student at the six institutions. The essays, which were evaluated this year, covered 20 different subjects. Turnitin.com checked the papers against publicly available Web sites and other electronic sources available to students. Turnitin.com is among the most widely used plagiarism-detection services. The service keeps student papers in order to enlarge its database of manuscripts, books, and journals. Other services, such as Copycatch and Eve2, run student papers through a computer program without holding on to the papers. In the Australian study, Turnitin.com detected that 166 of the essays, or 8.62 percent of the total, had more than a quarter of their material pilfered from electronic sources. Fourteen percent of the essays had 5 percent or more of the material plagiarized. The material was plagiarized from hundreds of Internet sites, including five well-known cheat sites, the report says. Plagiarism from other students' electronic papers also was detected. The study was conducted by a company called CAVAL Collaborative Solutions, which is owned by nine universities in the Australian state of Victoria (CAVAL stands for Cooperative Action among Victorian Academic Libraries). The company is recommending that Victoria's universities use Turnitin.com to control cheating among their students. The company also recommends that universities establish education programs to help students understand what cheating and plagiarism mean. "Universities are bound to lose their reputations unless they do something about it," says Steve O'Connor, chief executive officer of CAVAL. Mr. O'Connor says CAVAL decided to use Turnitin.com to evaluate the essays because of the breadth of electronic sources it compares student papers to. In addition, the service was highly recommended by Britain's Joint Information Systems Committee, which recently signed a contract with Turnitin.com under which the company serves more than 700 higher-education institutions in Britain. The six institutions involved in the study were Deakin, La Trobe, Monash, RMIT, and Victoria Universities, and the University of Ballarat. About 150,000 students are enrolled in the universities. Richard L. Austin, a horticulture professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who designed a competing plagiarism-detection service, WordCheck, says higher-education officials need to attack the underpinnings of student plagiarism before signing up with plagiarism-detection services. Students are referred to Web sites so often that they lose sight of the difference between honest research and plagiarism, he says, adding that they also don't know how to cite material they find on the Internet. Background articles from The Chronicle: Plagiarism-Detection Tool Creates Legal Quandary (5/17/2002) The Cat-and-Mouse Game of Plagiarism Detection (7/6/2001) Web Services Help Professors Detect Plagiarism (11/12/1999) Web Site Will Check Students' Papers Against Data Base to Detect Plagiarism (12/11/1998) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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