A second look at SEER

Last week, a friend asked if I had come across a source evaluation tool which interacted with Turnitin’s text-matching software.  Attached to the email was a copy of Turnitin’s Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER).

That was news to me!   Interactive with Turnitin?  Trying to work out why my friend thought SEER was interactive, and with Turnitin, took me down some strange paths. And the search got me taking a second look at SEER, a second look and a closer look. A strange journey.

I had in fact been alerted to the release of the rubric back in January 2013, Continue reading

Imagine… (another flawed study)

The problem with plagiarism, as with any activity that those who indulge prefer to keep secret, is that we don’t know how prevalent it is, so we can’t say how effective are the measures we take to prevent or detect occurrences, or whether what we do really does make a difference.

Turnitin, probably the most well-known of the various online text-matching services (aka plagiarism checkers or plagiarism detectors), tries – possibly needs – to have it both ways.  They try to show that more and more students at all levels of education are plagiarising, so schools need to buy their detection services, and they also try to show that schools which use their services have reduced levels of plagiarism. Continue reading

Authentic Authenticity

A frequent question in academic and educational forums is, “How much help can a student get?”

The answer, not surprisingly, must be “It depends.”

In the first place, it depends on the terms of the assignment. If the instructions state that the work must be done without help, then no help is permitted.

If the instructions state that the work can or must be carried out in consultation Continue reading

Thirty percent

I use the Google Alert feature to be made aware of new web pages which include terms I regularly search for. It saves me having to remember to repeat my favourite searches, and it pinpoints new or changed pages.

I thought the feature had gone berserk the other day. My alert for “every written assignment they complete” usually gives me just one or two hits a week.  This week’s digest gave me forty hits. Continue reading

Plagiarise better?!

There’s an interesting article in a recent Palo Alto Online News. trading-postIt’s headed “Plagiarism website: trading post for English papers : Palo Alto High School students can run an ‘originality check’ before handing in papers on Turnitin.com” and the first paragraph reads:

An Internet-based plagiarism detector has become not only a tool for teachers but also a plagiarism instructor for students and a trading post for English papers.

I wasn’t sure – I’m still not sure – whether staff writer Chris Kenrick had used that term intentionally or not.  “Plagiarism instructor”…  How to plagiarise right (and get away with it?).

I’m definitely sure that Kenrick fails to make the case for Continue reading