Cheaters Prosper
The web, we'll all agree, has made it easier to cheat. On your wife, on your taxes, and on your school work.
But with every new technological advance in cheating comes a new technological way to combat it. At least in the academic field. The most controversial tool is something called Turnitin.
A tell-all blog post by a New York University professor claims that more than 20 business students at the elite private university plagiarized portions of the work they submitted for one of his classes. Criticism by students in their evaluation of the professor resulted in a financial penalty for him, he says.
Panagiotis Ipeirotis, a computer science professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, discovered the plagiarism in his fall undergraduate class using Turnitin, a service that compares student writing against a huge database of published and unpublished sources. In all, 22 of the 108 students in the class admitted using their classmates’ answers, or unattributed internet sources such as journals, on assignments, he wrote. Most of the assignments included at least 20 percent plagiarized material, and in some cases far more. All received negative grades for the plagiarized assignments. Two of the students ultimately left the class.
And -- of course you knew this, right? -- the professor is the one who suffered:
After announcing his intention to report the cheating to the dean unless students turned themselves in, Ipeirotis said, class became contentious and awkward, and his teaching evaluations suffered. His typical evaluation in this class, 6.0 to 6.5 out of 7.0, fell to 5.3. In his blog post, Ipeirotis wrote that Associate Dean Susan Greenbaum and the department chair "'expressed their appreciation' for...chasing such cases." But his "yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my 'teaching evaluations took a hit this year,'" he wrote.
This is a shame, because Turnitin seems like a perfect solution -- it's impersonal, infallible, and kind of cool, when you really think about it. And it's about time someone used the powerful indexing functions of the web to combat the use of, um, the powerful indexing functions of the web.
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Comments :
Re: Cheaters Prosper
Far and away the best part of this story is that the professor is named Panagiotis Ipeirotis.
Apr '11
Re: Cheaters Prosper
"But his "yearly salary increase was the lowest ever,". While it is wrong headed to put so much stock in the evaluations of students, especially ones caught cheating, it must be nice to have that hit taken on a built in annual raise, something most jobs don't include. Remember when you used to have to build up the courage (and have the justification) to ask for a raise?
Jun '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
Everything in life is turning into a battle of the engineers. The supreme irony will, of course, be when some engineer invents a computer program to write essays that use the internet's indexing algorithms to write "original" term papers and where they are unoriginal provide the proper citations.
Remember the old Mad Magazine Spy vs. Spy cartoons. Well we're there, Rob, except its Engineer vs. Engineer.
Jun '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
If you get caught cheating too much, you end up working for Media Matters. So, it really has tragic consequences.
Apr '11
Re: Cheaters Prosper
This surprises me. My two highschoolers turn everything in via turnitin. Have since they were freshmen. Its the only way your do it, for them. I've heard some kids have learned how to "beat the system" but its so much work, its just easier to do your own work. You have to rearrange sentence fragments and paragraphs and.... Plus you still can't be sure it won't match.
This professors story is sad but a couple of years and it will be the way of life. I thought it was pretty common in highschools, let alone college....
PS Computer science? writing assignments? Is that normal ?
Dec '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
*shrugs* this is an administrative problem not a technological problem. If the administration really cared about cheating there would be some sort of bonus for finding cheaters or at the very least an upward curve applied to the evaluations of class which contained convicted cheaters.
Who exactly finds Turntin controversial? Computer Science programs have been using similar tools for years. Same with the English and Philosophy departments if I recall correctly.
Yes actually. The private sector got feed up with all those science types who had great ideas in their head but couldn't communicate them to save their life. Now some sort of writing or technical writing is part of every Comp Sci curriculum.
Edited on Sep 2, 2011 at 10:43amJun '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
Nyadnar17: *shrugs* this is an administrative problem not a technological problem. If the administration really cared about cheating there would be some sort of bonus for finding cheaters or at the very least an upward curve applied to the evaluations of class which contained convicted cheaters.
Who exactly finds Turntin controversial? Computer Science programs have been using similar tools for years. Same with the English and Philosophy departments if I recall correctly.
Yes actually. The private sector got feed up with all those science types who had great ideas in their head but couldn't communicate them to save their life. Now some sort of writing or technical writing is part of every Comp Sci curriculum. · Sep 2 at 10:40am
Edited on Sep 02 at 10:43 am
My sister teaches the subject.
Aug '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
My favorite thing about Turnitin is that kids think they can fool it by paraphrasing a word or two per sentence. They can't. All it does is demonstrate culpability rather than a good faith mistake.
Jul '11
Re: Cheaters Prosper
I've missed something. Prof catches a cheat. Prof throws cheat out of his class, reports it to the Dean and the student disciplinary board, documents the cheating....in this case it was admitted....kid's gone. He's not in the evaluation denominator, so what's the beef?
I think I'm too old to accept the answer. I bet it has to do with the kid's NOT gone....because that'd piss off kid's daddy who sends a check every month...right?
Doncha' luvit? This is the same Professoriate that lectures the rest of us on the "morality" of our food consumption, carbon footprint, marriages, economy, foreign policy, alcohol use, cigar smokin', etc etc etc.
Cool dudes, for sure.
Jul '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
Turnitin was actually the bane of the braniac research nerds in my school's PoliSci/IR department. Many complained of scoring low on very well-researched and well-written papers because their direct, cited quotations would raise flags on Turitin.com. The professor in question wouldn't actually look for the specific examples of plagiarism, which would easily reveal that all passage taken from other documents were cited, but had a reputation of simply bumping down a half or full letter grade simply because of the red flag. So, like most things in life, this technological tool fixes one problem but creates another. The solution? As always, even with better and more impressive technology, humans cannot simply rest on technology to fix their problems. Vigilance and discipline is still required for the best result.
Edited on Sep 2, 2011 at 11:48amMar '11
Re: Cheaters Prosper
Granted the last Time I had a class that used turnitin was almost 10 years ago. However, the biggest problem back then is it would show you plagiarized your own material. Sometimes one would use the same paper in more than one class. If more than one used turnitin, you get caught for cheating. It is only a tool, to often professors relay only on its report.
Oct '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
We use Turnitin for a large portion (if not all) of the courses in the program I administer. It has really helped cut down on plagiarism, and thankfully we haven't had the problem of mass-plagiarism that happened in this story.
Humza is right, though. It does involve the instructor actually looking at the results rather than taking them as gospel, though.
May '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
There is much more to the story which folks can read here on Inside Higher Ed. The professor concluded that it simply was not a worthwhile exercise :
To Ipeirotis, the experience led him to vow never to go after cheaters again. "Was it worth it? Absolutely not," he wrote on the now-deleted blog post. "Not only [have] I paid a significant financial penalty for 'doing the right thing' (was I?) but I was also lectured by some senior professors that I 'should change slightly my assignments from year to year.' (Thanks for the suggestion, buddy, this is exactly how I detected the cheaters.) ... I also did not like the overall teaching experience, and this was the most important thing for me. Teaching became annoying and tiring. There was a very different dynamic in class, which I did not particularly enjoy. It was a feeling of 'me-against-them' as opposed to the much more pleasant 'these things that we are learning are really cool!' "
He was forced to delete his blog post (which is another story,) but his conclusion was that rather than focusing on catching cheaters, it was better to teach in a way that made cheating irrelevant.
Edited on Sep 2, 2011 at 2:11pmMay '10
Re: Cheaters Prosper
Sounds like he doesn't much like teaching, Trace.
I am steeped in higher academia. My resident plagiarism expert is a history prof who has a record of nailing plagiarizers every year the old-fashioned way- Google the sections that don't sound like the student's normal voice. Here is the gist of the reaction I got when I asked for comment:
1) The college's general counsel says students cannot be required to submit, profs can submit something suspicious as long as all the personal info is changed
2) Some students object to giving away the copyright of their work.
3) Science students complain about being brought up on charges for "plagiarized" lab reports when the same experiment is given year after year - the good reports all pretty much become paraphrases of each other, without anyone actually doing any cheating.
4) In History it's not necessary - plagiarized papers are always pretty obvious.
Apr '11
Re: Cheaters Prosper
I love that Googling the suspect sections is the "old-fashioned way". Of course, back in the day the way Google worked was you telegraphed your request to a huge library on the West Coast, where a team of spinsters worked day and night to look up the answers and telegraphed you back the result. But it worked, dammit!