Plagiarism 1
Running head: REDUCING PLAGIARISM WITH TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
Reducing Plagiarism with Technology Solutions
Kristi N. Garrett
The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa
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Is the occurrence of plagiarism an oversight or intentional deception? Course after
course, students within the education system are reprimanded for plagiarism and it continues
without showing signs of ceasing with the increased use of the Internet. The 2008 United States
vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was recently marked as using the words from one of
Newt Gingrich’s articles as words of her own. An article in the Huffington Post states that Palin
did give credit to Gingrich at the beginning and end of her speech and she did not use exact
phrases, but instead paraphrased which is not considered plagiarism among the masses. With
this being a media highlight, it offers questions about what constitutes plagiarism and how to
diminish this issue within our education system.
According to Olivas and Thompson (2008), plagiarism occurs when the original owner of
a source of ideas, opinions, theories, facts, or words is not given recognition. However, if the
information is considered common knowledge and can be found in multiple reference sources,
such as, dictionaries, encyclopedia, or almanacs, then citation is not required. In effort to reduce
plagiarism, different software is now available to help identify illegal use of words. Let us first
take a look at how plagiarism has been transformed into Internet businesses, therefore requiring
the education systems to take more drastic approaches.
With the wide range of information available on the Internet, the use of “Paper Mills” is
becoming the new phenomena. Ronald Roach (1998) explains paper milling as a method of
selling research, essays, and other forms of pre-written class documents to desperate students
with the use of the Internet. In order to understand the paper mill method, a quick overview of a
couple available paper mills is worth mentioning.
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AcaDemon, Bookrag, and 123HelpMe are three competitors in the paper milling industry
that offer pre-written documents that are available to the student consumer (see sites for
AcaDemon, Bookrag, and 123HelpMe, 2009). Bookrag.com reports that their site contains over
8.3 million pages of content available to their consumers. 123HelpMe.com reports that their site
contains over 3,000 essays, narratives, and research documents. AcaDemon has reportedly been
buying and selling documents from a student clientele of over 120,000 since 2000. The cost of
pre-written documents on these sites range from around $17 and above depending on the
required time span and the page quantity. There are several Internet sites available to desperate
students, for which the students fail to do a quality validation check on the pre-written
documents for plagiary, therefore requiring instructors to become more informed on how to use
plagiarism prevention tools.
One of the more familiar plagiarism software tools that detect plagiarism is called
TurnItIn. TurnItIn is designed to assist the instructor with preventing oversight of citation in
documents. As an online instructor for Virginia College Online, I have had the opportunity to
use TurnItIn for my classes and found it to be useful, yet it contains other features that could
require more in depth training for instructors whom are less technology savvy. The way that the
tool works is by having the students submit their work into the TurnItIn repository. Virginia
College Online actually had the tool linked within the course management system, Angel, so that
the instructor could create a folder in TurnItIn for the applicable assignment. Other course
management systems that support TurnItIn are Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, and Desire2Learn.
When the instructor is ready to grade the assignments he/she can perform a scan that displays
results based on originality, in which the instructor can allow the student to see the results,
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therefore providing an opportunity for the student to include the proper citations before their
final submission.
According to a study done by Gregory (2002) at the University of Maine, TurnItIn did
not uncover all recognizable material. In his findings, TurnItIn was limited in its ability to detect
and flag plagiarized material from the following source material: password protected sites, PDF
files, foreign languages, with the exception of some Spanish. Therefore, this makes it more
tempting for students to use paper milling sites like AcaDemon, Bookrag, and 123HelpMe
because the commonality of these sites is that they require a user name and password in order to
access and place orders, as a result the inability of some of the plagiarism prevention tools to
search theses sites makes it harder for instructors to reduce plagiarism in their classes. Below is
a screenshot of a sample originality report from a TurnItIn tutorial. The red and green text in the
left column matches Internet sites that contain the same text. The right column corresponds with
the numbered text in the left column and also includes the percentage of the text match with that
of the Internet site. Source number one shows that it is a 31% match from
www.users.bigpond.com. Therefore, it can be concluded that this verbiage was copied from the
Internet site. However, TurnItIn does not show if this information was properly cited, so the
instructor would need to perform a citation validation.
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Figure 1: TurnItIn Originality Report provided by www.turnitin.com
Another plagiarism detection tool is SafeAssign (also known as MyDropBox).
According to the Internet website, SafeAssign (2009) was developed by and is available on the
Blackboard course management system with a free trial version. Kanner and Fiedler (2008) did
a study on TurnItIn and SafeAssign, in which they concluded that both lacked sufficient ability
to identify plagiarism of password protected databases. In a comparison of the same set of
papers, “SafeAssign missed 8 out of 13 plagiarized papers and TurnItIn missed 9 out of 13”
(Kanner and Fielder, 2008, p. 187). This reflection shows that neither tool is capable of
identifying 100% of plagiarism. Below is a screenshot of a sample originality report provided by
SafeAssign. Notice the yellow highlighted portions in the report represent material that is
flagged as plagiarized information from a paper mill source. The green highlighted portion was
flagged as information from an Internet source. Again, the instructor would need to perform a
quality check on the student’s paper in order to determine if the proper citations were included.
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Figure 2: SafeAssign Originality Report provided by www.safeassign.com
In a world saturated with technology, educators are challenged with identifying pedagogy
techniques that will help educate students on plagiary prevention, although, there seems to be a
lack of concern amongst many of our students in regards to plagiarism, therefore requiring
alternate means of addressing the issue. Students do not realize that they are cheating
themselves out of learning the proper techniques for essay and research writing. The desire for
fast and easy “microwave” results is the driving force for our society, which seems to decrease
the desire and value of a true pedagogical experience. Technology has opened the doors to better
assist our educators, but the workload is increasing which limits pedagogical preparation and
forces the educators to become more of quality managers over their classes. A key solution is
providing more technology focused training for educators in order to preserve the merit of our
education system.
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References
AcaDemon. (2009). AcaDemon. Retrieved July 17, 2009 from www.AcaDemon.com
Bookrags. (2009). Bookrags. Retrieved July 17, 2009 from www.Bookrags.com
Gregory, J. (2002). Ensuring academic integrity in the age of the Internet:
Evaluating a web- based analytic tool. [Electronic version]. IEEE Conference
Processings, 2, 1363 – 1364.
Kanner, C., Fielder, R. (2008). A cautionary note on checking software engineering
papers for plagiarism. [Electronic version]. IEEE Transactions, Volume 51, Issue 2, 184
– 188.
Lathrop, A., Foss, K.E. (2000). Student cheating and plagiarism in the Internet era. Colorado:
Libraries Unlimited, LLC.
Olivas, T. &Thompson, S. (2008). Plagiarism Prevention for Students. Retrieved July 16,
2009 from http://library.csusm.edu/plagiarism/
Roach, R. (1998). Diverse: Issues in higher education. Retrieved July 13, 2009 from
http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_8721.shtml
Weiner, R. (2009, June). Palin denies plagiarism. Retrieved July 13, 2009, from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/08/palin-denies-plagiarism-c_n_212439.html
123HelpMe. (2009). 123HelpMe. Retrieved July 17, 2009 from
http://www.123helpme.com/privacy.asp