Two interesting posts about studies about plagiarism:
Wikipedia Is The Go To Site For College Plagiarists (Steven Bell)
http://keptup.typepad.com/academic/2011/11/wikipedia-is-the-go-to-site-for-college-plagiarists.html
“A new analysis of “unoriginal” writing by the anti-plagiarism site Turnitin finds that college students aren’t much better than high school students at choosing their sources. A growing number of college presidents and faculty are concerned about student plagiarism in the Internet age. But the questions raised by this analysis go beyond ethics. Wouldn’t professors be disheartened to
learn that a significant share of students are harvesting their facts not from an old-fashioned encyclopedia but from Yahoo Answers? Wikipedia is the most popular source of borrowed text on the Internet in both high school and college,
according to the Turnitin analysis of 33 million student papers.”
Plagiarism Differences in High School and College Students (Mind/Shift)
By Audrey Watters November 3, 2011
Highlights:
“A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy.
But another interesting fact emerged from the report about the difference between high school and college students. While 31% of content matches for high school students came from social and “content-sharing” sites (like Facebook or Yahoo Answers), just 26% of the matches for college students originated there.
College students were more likely to use content from cheat sites and paper mills, the report finds: 19.6% of content matches in college students’ papers came from those sites, whereas just 14.1% of matches to high school students’ papers. College students were also more likely to turn to news sites — 16.6% versus 12.3% of college students. And even though Wikipedia was the most popular source for copied content, encyclopedias in general constituted roughly 11-12% of content for both populations.”
“The report doesn’t indicate whether or not students cited these sources (it’s likely that many did). And TurnItIn doesn’t always catch plagiarized material from behind paywalls — sites that require subscriptions, for example, like many academic journals may not be included in what TurnItIn indexes.
TurnItIn’s report backs up a recent Pew Research Center survey, which showed that more than half of college presidents said that they believe plagiarism has increased among their students over the course of the last decade. None of this is surprising, of course. The “copy-and-paste” functionality and the massive amount of online material available makes it a lot easier to take whole sections of a Web site and plop it into one’s assignment. As long as the source is cited, of course, it’s not necessarily considered plagiarism.”
Stuff to munch on for those who teach information ethics . . .
Stephen
2 Responses
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I haven’t looked at the numbers or how the TurnItIn study was conducted, but I find it interesting that a company that makes money by helping faculty detect plagiarism reached those conclusions. I’m not saying that they cooked their numbers with the hope that it would increase sales. I’m just saying that it’s interesting.
Talk about plagiarism also reminds me of something I heard at the recent EDUCAUSE conference. Cheating isn’t new. Students have been doing it for a long time. Technology probably makes it easier for students to cheat in this day and age, but that’s missing the point. Technology isn’t the issue in many cases. It’s the way the assignment is designed that may be the culprit. Maybe TurnItIn can look at that too?
I suppose being wrong doesn’t save you from the charge of plagiarism but that would certainly add to the humiliation. I find it incredible that Yahoo answers is still around.