* [[[ INTERNET PLAGIARISM ]]] *
It's final term paper time for senior English classes, so this
Nugget provides a bit of teacher inservice on the growing problem
of students passing off, as their own work, essays that they have
found on the Internet.
Sandra Hawkins, a B.C. classrom teacher and Distance Ed tutor, writes:
> Here's a website which English teachers should be aware of:
http://www.sparknotes.com/guides
> For years I have done independent studies of classic novels with my
> senior English students. Recently, when one novel project looked
> very different from a student's usual writing style, I decided to
> do a web search and found the above website to be a major source
> of instant book summaries, reports, etc. written by Harvard
> students. I now treat this site and other such sites as I do Coles'
> notes and other "cribs" and "trots." It's all right to read them,
> but not in lieu of the novel! I tell students that I will also be
> using the websites. If student's don't credit their sources or are
> too dependent on them--no credit or, perhaps, worse, if I find they
> are trying to pull a scam...
Providing lazy students with ready-made essays has become an
Internet cottage industry in recent years. In fact, our CLN
Web site has a Theme Page devoted to the subject:
http://www.cln.org/themes/plagiarism.html. Links on this Theme
Page document many suggestions from educators on how to spot
Internet or "Copy-and-Paste" plagiarism.
There are commercial products that can do even more, because they
reverse the student's process: they take your student's essay and
scour the Web for matching documents! Here are three such products.
Network Nuggets is not in a position to review or endorse commercial
products, so teachers will need to evaluate for themselves if the
automation provided by products like these is worth their cost.
http://www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml
A relatively inexpensive product, through which you as
teacher run the students' essays, one file at a time, for
an Internet plagiarism check. This partly automates the
process which Sandra Hawkins used to identify the
Sparknotes essay.
http://www.plagiarism.org
A more comprehensive service: your students submit their
essays to this site, and it delivers the essays to you
along with a plagiarism report on each essay. (Since
students know it's going to screen all essays, it also
serves as a deterrent to plagiarism.)
http://www.plagiarism.com/screening.htm
This product does not use a Web connection, but provides
a clever method for a student to demonstrate to you that
he or she indeed composed the essay. It detects plagiarism
from any source, including literate friends.
----------------------
Network Nuggets is a free service of the Community Learning Network
(http://www.cln.org/) and Open School (http://www.openschool.bc.ca/).
We send these announcements to subscribers on CLN's NetworkNuggets,
to inform them about potentially useful educational resources on the
Internet-- but we are not guaranteeing that these resources will be
valuable and without frustrations.
Network Nuggets Archives: http://www.cln.org/lists/nuggets/archives.html
To Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://www.cln.org/lists/nuggets/subscribe.html
Dave Rogers, Interim Moderator of Network Nuggets
(mailto:Nuggets@cln.etc.bc.ca)