PlagTracker – free online service for plagiarism checking

Just a very quick post to point you towards something I recently came across through the power of Twitter – plagtracker.com. This is an online service which will scan a block of text (i.e. an essay/paper) and compare it to internet pages and a database of academic papers. The best thing about it though, is that it’s completely free!

I tested it out by pasting in a block of text from a previous post on this blog, and it seemed to perform pretty well, in that it correctly identified the source of the material as this site. It produces quite a nicely formatted report with links to the source material too:

PlagTracker.com report.

Pretty cool. The web interface means it probably isn’t that useful for essay-markers who want to batch-check a whole load of student essays, but if I was a student, I would definitely be using this service to check my essays before submission – plagiarism can happen by accident after all, and can often be fixed by just citing the correct sources. I say ‘often’ because you still have to remember the golden rule of undergraduate essays – for the love of God, don’t cite Wikipedia as a source!

TTFN.

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The student essay as an assessment technique – an obsolete technology?

This post is a bit of a diversion from normal service, but it’s been inspired by some things I’ve been reading recently on essays (or ‘papers’ for my North American readers) and student assessment. The first was this piece on plagiarism and essay-mills, and the second was this piece here. Both highlight some current issues with assessment methods at university/college level, such as plagiarism, something which I’ve also covered before.

So anyway, in keeping (vaguely) with the theme of this blog I thought I’d take a look at the essay/paper as a technique (or ‘technology’ if you will – see what I did there?) for educational assessment and try and determine whether it’s still up-to-date, or as obsolete as a 5-inch floppy disk. Or a 28.8K modem. Or leaving your goddam twitter account alone for five minutes and giving someone your undivided attention during a social interaction. You get the idea.

So, the essay* as a literary format is a curious one. Canonically it has its origins in the 1580s with Michel de Montaigne; probably the first person to describe themselves as an ‘essayist’, although he was apparently inspired by Plutarch. Interestingly, a similar format existed in the Japanese literary tradition since its very early period. It first became formalised as a standard way of assessing students in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A pandemical plague of plagiarism

This post has been inspired by a couple of very interesting pieces I read over the last couple of days. The first was this article, written by an associate professor from NYU. Unfortunately the original article has been taken down for some legal reason, but you can read a summary here. The second was this piece written by an academic from Imperial College. Both articles bemoan the current attitude of students regarding plagiarism, and both also have something to say about the steps that can be taken by academics and institutions to combat it. I would urge those who are interested to read both pieces and the attached discussion in the comments to the articles.

This is a highly emotive topic, with a lot of issues that surround it. Instances of genuine plagiarism used to be extremely rare, but the advent of the internet, PDF papers and wikipedia made it just so easy to copy and paste sentences, paragraphs, even whole sections into your essay. Faculty members that I know of have found that an increasing proportion of their time is spent dealing with cases of plagiarism, and efforts to educate students about exactly what plagiarism is, and how to avoid it in their work, have only been partially successful. Institutions have in general failed to address the issue, or are only just waking up to the fact that they need to address it. In many cases, institutions have strict rules and heavy sanctions for plagiarism cases, which if they were to be strictly applied to the enormous volume of cases which now occur, would mean a substantial proportion of the student body would be heavily penalised, or even asked to leave the institution.

All that aside, in keeping with the theme of this blog, my aim here is to discuss the technology and software that is currently being used to address (and in some cases, exacerbate) the problem.