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Karl Schembri
Students at the University of Malta will soon have to think twice before plagiarising works of others in their assignments as the administration intends investing in anti-cheating software that will be able to check every phrase they submit to their lecturers.
A scourge probably as old as academia, the blatant copying of chunks of texts in students’ assignments and theses is known to have been on the rise worldwide since the advent of internet, making the detection of copied work more difficult, but new sophisticated software is developing to scrutinise their work.
The university’s quality assurance committee is planning to acquire a license to install a plagiarism preventing package on campus so that lecturers could leave the policing for computers and focus more on teaching.
In an announcement sent by e-mail last Friday, Committee Chairman and Pro-rector Charles Farrugia has appealed to all lecturers who feel “plagued by plagiarism” to share their experiences before university decides on the plan of action. He also called on “members of staff who have experience in this area” to get in touch with him and share their expertise.
“Copying someone else’s work without acknowledging it is a growing phenomenon you find in every university,” Prof. Farrugia told MaltaToday. “Internet has made it much easier to copy and paste and download whole essays.”
But the same technology is now offering efficient ways of policing students’ works.
“There are now means to detect copied essays and we’re searching for the best software product on the market,” he said.
Apart from easy access to websites offering ready-made essays, students may succumb to the temptation of plagiarising when faced with stress.
“External pressure such as working part-time while studying, having to write in a language that isn’t one’s mother tongue, stress, lack of personal organisation, and heavy coursework load, can all trigger plagiarism,” Prof. Farrugia said.
Large classes and unpopular yet compulsory credits are also considered breeding grounds of plagiarism.
Lecturers of the History of Mediterranean Civilisation course – obligatory for all Bachelor of Arts students – have repeatedly noticed similar passages in separate essays and sudden jumps from childish sentences to encyclopaedic paragraphs.
“Students who deliberately plagiarise are the most worrying because they anger other students who do not cheat, they discourage lecturers who want to teach rather than police students, they consume staff time in pursuing and punishing offenders, and they devalue the education system,” Prof. Farrugia said.
Plagiarism police
Research on plagiarism done in 2002 in five Australian universities found that 8.8 per cent of works submitted contained more than 25 per cent of unattributed material downloaded from the internet.
In the US, more than half of high-school students admitted plagiarising from the internet in a 2001 national survey of 4,500 students conducted by Donald McCabe, a Rutgers University professor.
One of the plagiarism detection devices which Prof. Farrugia is looking at is called turnitin.com – a widely-used and acclaimed sophisticated software package created for universities and licensed to hundreds of campuses and post-secondary schools.
The programme compares students’ essays to all the text available publicly on the internet as well as a vast archive of books, journals and over 10 million essays already inputted into the service. Matching text is displayed on the computer screen underlined and the lecturer can then link to the original document.
Turnitin.com was founded by John Barrie in the 1990s when he was a student marking papers at the University of California at Berkley. Using his own neurobiology research into brain wave patterns, he created a system that converts essays into strings of numbers that can be compared to other texts.
A lecturer gets a report within five minutes from submitting a paper to the system, highlighting every piece that matches another source. By clicking on it, the examiner can go to the source, or compare the texts side by side.
Other plagiarism detectors that have emerged since then include Essay Verification Engine and MyDropBox.com, but the downside to these systems is that they are limited to checking only documents available on internet.
With its own expanding archive, turnitin.com can catch a student copying off his older friend, or two students submitting the same essay to two different lecturers at different universities.
Prof. Farrugia highlighted also some less sophisticated methods that may be closer to the spirit of teaching and imparting academic ethics in combating plagiarism.
“During Freshers’ Week at University, students could be taught how to reference work, to take notes preserving the link with the source, to paraphrase, to summarise and the use of in-text citation,” he said. “All members of staff need to be committed to deterring and stopping plagiarism, to instil a sense of morality and pride for the ownership of essays in students.”
Referring to practices adopted by universities abroad, Prof. Farrugia said other methods include nominating staff to be in charge of dealing with plagiarism, keeping records of all incidences of plagiarism and what action has been taken against it.
“In some universities a panel of people dealing with plagiarism interviews students who plagiarise and the student is asked to explain why s/he plagiarised,” he said.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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