Growing problems

Posted on 8 May, 2014 by John Royce

(mis-) Use of statistical data is growing problem

The headline actually reads Plagiarism is growing problem, teachers believe.

And it’s the first line of the story which really grabs the attention:

NINE out of 10 teachers believe their pupils copy, a survey has found.

Isn’t that depressing, masses of suspicion? Nine teachers out of ten mistrust their students?

A few lines on, the claim is repeated, with a further alarming note:

More than 92% of teachers said they think their students plagiarise, and almost a third believe it is on the increase. Continue reading →

A Matter of Definition

Posted on 8 April, 2014 by John Royce

In my last post, I admitted to uncertainty with regard to Jane Goodall’s unattributed use of other people’s words and thoughts: is it fair to call this plagiarism, when the faulty passages were discovered and corrections made before the book was actually published?

The situation is more complicated in that Goodall’s poor note-making and attribution practices were uncovered by a reviewer for a national newspaper, not by Goodall, not by her co-author, not by her publishers. It is the fact of pre-publication that gives me pause. It doesn’t help, though it might, if we were told if the reviewer was reading a galley proof or a pre-publication copy, or if it was the final printed hardback that he was reading. The revelation was made 4 months before the expected publication date, so it may well have been a review/proof copy.

I am inclined to think that would make a difference. I think of schools in which Continue reading →

Thinking thoughts

Posted on 2 April, 2014 by John Royce

Today’s GuardianOnline includes a possibly misleading article. Today is 1 April*, and the article is headed :

Jane Goodall blames ‘chaotic note taking’ for plagiarism controversy
Scientist revises her book Seeds of Hope after allegations 12 sections were lifted from other websites

My first thought was of the date, April Fools’ Day.

My second thought was, “Not again?” – for I recalled that Goodall had been involved in a plagiarism controversy last year.

My third thought was the date again…

It was not an April Fools’ joke. But Continue reading →

By any other name…

Posted on 1 April, 2014 by John Royce

An interesting way of putting it : “extensive text overlap.”

The full Retraction reads,

This article [1] has been retracted by the author due to extensive text overlap with a previous publication by Roberts et al. [2]. The author apologises for any inconvenience caused.

The offending paper, now retracted, is “Infantile colic, facts and fiction” by Abdelmoneim E.M. Kheir. It was published in the Italian Journal of Pediatrics (IPJ) in 2012. There is a note on the page that this paper is “Highly accessed.”

The text overlap which has been identified is with Continue reading →

Studies in Statistics 2

Posted on 25 February, 2014 by John Royce

(This post leads on from the last blog post, Studies in Statistics.)

Headlines can be so misleading.

Hundreds cheating on University of Wolverhampton courses, shouts the Express & Star. The subhead tells us more: Hundreds of students have been caught passing off other people’s work as their own.

It’s a shock-horror headline for sure.

The story, as so often, may be a little less dramatic than the headline suggests Continue reading →

Texas sharp-shooting?

Posted on 7 January, 2014 by John Royce

Congratulations, Ben Goldacre! Damning Report From The Public Accounts Committee On Clinical Trial Results Being Withheld tells it all.

On 3 January, the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons issued a report which expressed concern at the fact that pharmaceutical companies tend to publish results of clinical trials which make them look good, but withhold publication of trials in which the results are less favourable. This affects doctors’ knowledge and perceptions Continue reading →

Back to basics (2)

Posted on 12 December, 2013 by John Royce

As if hot on the heels of my last post, Adam Dachis has posted the advice Use a Plagiarism Checker to Get References for a Research Paper on LifeHacker.

He lists a number of free “plagiarism-checkers,” including Plagiarisma (critiqued in Authentic Authenticity).

Dachis is aware that few “plagiarism-checkers” discover all “borrowed” material, so he advises

Your mileage may vary with the different tools, so you probably should run your paper through a few of them to get all your sources. Continue reading →

Back to basics – writing skills

Posted on 7 December, 2013 by John Royce

The case of Carrie Pfeiffer-Fiala raises some interesting questions, and may even supply, if not answers, at least some insight into “accidental” plagiarism.

As reported in Scene & Heard, in an article by Doug Brown which was headlined Ex-Kent State Ph.D-Candidate’s Lawsuit: No Such Thing as ‘Plagiarism’ in First Drafts, Pfeiffer-Fiala had submitted a first draft of the first chapter of her PhD dissertation to her professor. Her professor found unattributed passages and claimed she had plagiarised parts of her dissertation. Pfeiffer-Fiala argued that this was but a draft. Brown quotes her as arguing “that she knew that citations were incomplete in the draft … and that any citation omissions were inadvertent would be addressed in the editing process and subsequent iterations towards a final submission… .” The case is going to law. Continue reading →

Not funny

Posted on 3 December, 2013 by John Royce

My plagiarism alert brought me a Press Release today, mint-new!

PRWeb announced: Plagiarism Removal Introduces Plagiarism Checking Services : The service ensures no project has copied content from another body of academic work.

It’s a new service… and it might even be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Plagiarism Removal is a site based in India. If it’s front-page looks familiar, that could be because it bears strong similarities with the WriteCheck website: the fonts, the layout, the icons, the buttons the colours, Continue reading →

Guilty: how do you plead?

Posted on 19 November, 2013 by John Royce

WriteCheck has introduced a new feature, Ask WriteCheck, in which students are invited to ask questions about “plagiarism, citation, grammar/writing, and many other tricky situations that may occur at school.”

The very first question posed to Ask WriteCheck gets a very strange answer, one of those Continue reading →

WriteCheck gets it wrong (again)

Posted on 13 November, 2013 by John Royce

The latest entry on the WriteCheck blog, 3 Ways to Avoid Plagiarism – Summary, Paraphrase and Quote includes a teaching video and the transcript of the spoken text.

It’s an interesting piece; I’m not sure how useful the video would be as a teaching tool or as a learning tool. There are too many holes in it.

Again and again, in the video and in the text, we are told:

Avoiding plagiarism is pretty simple because there are only 3 ways to borrow information, so you only need to know the requirements for these three techniques, and you should have it. The three ways to save yourself from plagiarizing are summary, paraphrase and quote.

And that’s just plain wrong. Continue reading →

Breaking the spell

Posted on 5 November, 2013 by John Royce

I think I recall that, when Microsoft first added a spell checker to MS Word, there was outcry that it would give unfair advantage to students who could afford Word, as against those who could not, or maybe could not even afford a computer. Fears were also expressed that people would forget how to spell, that children might never learn how to spell, and, of course, claims about the inaccuracies and “lack of intelligence” of spell-checkers.

Never mind that Word was not the first word-processing software to include a spell-check.

Nowadays, we take the use of spell-checkers for granted. Continue reading →

Still in beta?

Posted on 12 October, 2013 by John Royce

This week saw the official release of a new citation generator, WorksCited4U.com.

More strictly, it is a “bibliography composer.” It aims to provide a free service, and it has many exciting and potentially helpful features.

The features include Continue reading →

Imagine… (another flawed study)

Posted on 30 September, 2013 by John Royce

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

Posted on 28 September, 2013 by John Royce

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 →

Never mind the quality, just keep taking the tablet

Posted on 12 September, 2013 by John Royce

I have just taken part in a live Turnitin webcast, Grade Anywhere: Turnitin for iPad (free but you need to register your email address; you’ll then be sent a link to the webcast).

The webcast is meant to promote their new iPad app, and it seems it is true, now you can grade (almost?) anywhere. You don’t even need a live internet connection, as long as you synced your iPad to your Turnitin account and downloaded student work before you went offline.

A pity then that Turnitin itself is flawed. Continue reading →

How much rewriting?

Posted on 31 August, 2013 by John Royce

“Plagiarism avoidance” is a term to be avoided.

It suggests that it does not matter what we write and how we write it, the aim of the game is to beat Turnitin.

It isn’t.

This is not a new line of thought. I have voiced it before, in posts such as Plagiarise better?! and Avoiding “plagiarism avoidance.”

Would that we could get rid of the “P” word, or at least use it more wisely Continue reading →

‘ware those links

Posted on 7 August, 2013 by John Royce

The chase starts with an alert from the International Baccalaureate Group on Linked-In.

“Six ways to perform excellent Research for Academic Writing,” it says. It is posted by Matt. And it looks worth following up. On the surface… Continue reading →

Help the reader!

Posted on 12 July, 2013 by John Royce

One of the reasons for citing and referencing our sources is to help the reader judge the authority and the currency of other people’s work, especially when we use it to support our discussions and our arguments. What’s more, the interested reader can follow up a reference, chase it down and find out more. Citing and referencing is not just a matter of respect for those whose work we use, it is respect for those who read our work as well.

Curiously and perhaps ironically, it was an article on the front page of Ethos (June 2013), a monthly newsletter published by the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), which set me off on this train of thought

The Ethos article reprints the first part of Cheating Epidemic, Continue reading →

Caught out

Posted on 25 June, 2013 by John Royce

One of my favourite classroom activities is to invite students to look at and critique selected custom-essay-writing sites. At first I wondered about the value of this exercise, whether it drew students’ attention to their existence rather than frightening them off. But I am sure students would find these sites anyway, and it seems better to demonstrate their shortcomings in a relaxed manner than to have students miss those shortcomings in the panic of a deadline due.

Over the years, cheat sites and paper mills have changed their tactics and the services they claim to offer. I put this down partly to Continue reading →

Typical? Typical!

Posted on 8 June, 2013 by John Royce

iThenticate recently released an infographic headed “iThenticate Plagiarism Graphic” which, they claim, “illustrates the growing problem of plagiarism and other forms of misconduct in research, as well as the types of damages that are incurred by misconduct.” The page is an “extension” of a recent iThenticate study “True Costs of Research Misconduct.”

The factoids are startling, as of course they are meant to be, and unlike some of the iThenticate group’s earlier infographics, Continue reading →

An early start

Posted on 11 May, 2013 by John Royce

Two passages in an article in The Australian caught my eye recently.

The article carries the headline “Tracey Bretag says schools must teach how to reference information from the internet” and the story, written by The Australian’s Education Editor Sheradyn Holderhead, opens:

TELL US: Should proper referencing be taught at schools?
UNIVERSITY students do not understand plagiarism and cheating rules because cutting and pasting from the internet has become common practice in schools, a leading academic warns. Continue reading →

Do we need the middleman?

Posted on 11 April, 2013 by John Royce

The robots are coming! The robots are coming!

I’m just reading a New York Times article, Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break. It’s one of those the-machines-can-do-it-better-than-you pieces. In this case, the machines can grade student essays. And students can do better too, if they give the machines what they want. Forget originality, creativity, accuracy, thought. Just give the machines what they have been programmed to look for, just fill in the boxes – and don’t ever think outside one? Continue reading →

Fewer cases of plagiarism

Posted on 10 April, 2013 by John Royce

The online THE (Times Higher Education) recently carried a headline: Turnitin is turning up fewer cases of plagiarism. That’s good news.

The subtitle of Paul Rump’s article runs “Cases of serious cheating fall by 60 per cent, company says.” Serious cheating is apparently defined as essays where more than 75% is made up of unoriginal material, and the figures as given in the article are impressive: Continue reading →

Carried away

Posted on 6 April, 2013 by John Royce

Every so often, we have a good laugh – or cry – at a newspaper report of someone who, believing their GPS rather than their own eyes, drives a high vehicle into a low bridge, or drives into a river, or maybe drives 3000 km across Europe on what should have been a one-hour journey. No, surely not?

And then there is Turnitin. I often wonder whether Turnitin and its sister companies sometimes get carried away, Continue reading →

Honesty, honestly…

Workshops, Advice & Consultancy – for teachers, librarians, students…

Category Archives: Academic honesty