With the fast-paced development of the Internet of things, plagiarism detection software has given an edge to professors in the fight against plagiarism. Commercial products such as Turnitin.com attempt to cover the online world along with a process of screening student assignments against a databank of past assignments. According to the Turnitin website, a student paper receives an “originality score” after it is compared against 45 billion current and archived webpages, 337 million student papers and an additional 130 million published articles. Every day, the database of student papers increases by 190,000 completed assignments. (“Turnitin Content”, 2015)
With such powerful tools at the disposal of professors, it seems surprising that plagiarism is still a common practice. A Toronto Star article reported on studies showing nearly one in three students have used online material verbatim in their assignments. (Infantry, 2013, p. GT4) Chris Spence completed his dissertation in 1996, prior to the development of Turnitin. Today, it is an open question as to how his dissertation would have fared through the process of a Turnitin originality report if it had been available. Perhaps his penchant for plagiarizing would have been dampened, forcing him down a more honorable path. In an interesting twist of events, Spence’s lawyer has said that he “will introduce a motion* to throw out the charges [of plagiarism]. He said there has been an abuse of process because Spence’s dissertation was run through the commonly used plagiarism-detecting software turnitin.com without Spence’s consent, which violates university policy.” (Rushowy, 2014, p. GT3)
*The proposed motion was intended as part of a university tribunal scheduled for July 15, 2014. This tribunal hearing was cancelled as the result of other legal issues. A new hearing has yet to be scheduled.
Update:
Over a five year period the University of Toronto attempted to hold a hearing into the matter of the legitimacy of Spence's dissertation. They were continually put off by Spence, who cited health issues. Spence was unable to substantiate his health claims. In the fifth year, the hearing moved forward, stripping Spence of his dissertation. Spence and his lawyer did not attend the hearing. On appeal, the original decision was upheld (Carty, 2018).
(Final) (but you just never know with that guy) Update:
Spence's appeal to the Ontario Divisional Court also failed. The court noted, "'The Tribunal found Mr. Spence guilty of academic dishonesty in connection with his doctoral thesis. It found 67 examples of plagiarized content: some as short as a few sentences and some several pages long, the longest of which was nine pages'" (Mandel, 2019, para. 3).
Even without the advent and development of plagiarism detecting software, an experienced professor is still a formidable opponent for students who would want to plagiarize. While there are many ways for instructors to sniff out plagiarism, professors may begin the process by unassumingly collecting writing samples near the beginning of a term. This procedure may be disguised as an in-class writing assignment where there is no opportunity for students to appropriate another person’s writing. By obtaining a writing sample, professors secure a benchmark to compare the student's writing style against future assignments.
One method of detecting plagiarism in an assignment is to look for a “silver bullet” as a kind of starting place. In this case, I am referring to the “silver bullet” as a segment of writing in a student’s assignment that seems out of place or outside of the margins of the particular student’s writing style, or appears to have been written by someone with more writing experience. Even if the plagiarism is not immediately matched to the original source, it gives the professor a lead. Finding other questionable segments and comparing them against a search of the web and comparing them to student work from previous semesters usually produces a match to the original source.
Also, do not forget that the professor is the architect of each assignment, they are very familiar with the subject matter, and they have a good memory or record of assignments from previous semesters and different sections of the same course.
And, they all work together!
Perhaps you have heard of ChatGPT? If you have not heard of ChatGPT, it is likely that the "professional academic writing service" market has, (click on purple/black image above for an example) and it may be putting them out of business.
There are (or were) several writing services, also known as contract cheating services, available. Contract cheating involves hiring an unscrupulous person/company to write your "plagiarism free" assignment for you, in record time. Costs vary, but expect to pay a minimum of $15 per page.
Now, what if there was a tool that could do the very same thing, with no fee attached, and instantaneously? Enter the budding world of ChatGPT, and other artificially intelligent writing products! Who knows, it may be that "academic writing service companies" are using ChatGPT.
Can you imagine paying a "writing professional" to use a free AI tool to write your paper?
While ChatGPT may do a decent job of writing something that kind of sounds like a marginally smarter version of you wrote it, the AI tool has the unfortunate habit of producing bogus in-text citations and bogus references (Perkins, 2023, p. 5)..
As you can imagine, there is an on-going "arms race" between AI writing tool developers and AI writing detection regimes.
Either way, the use of "academic writing services" or AI writing tools both violate the mantra of: do your own work, and are forms of cheating.
In this exercise, you will have the opportunity to practice the intrepid art of plagiarism detection. Put yourself in the shoes of your professor or those of an avid newsreader. Carefully read Dr. Spence’s opinion article, Without School Sports, Everyone Loses, and try to find the so-called “silver bullet.” Discuss your results.
P.S. If you are a high school student writing about this Chris Spence thing and you cannot access this article, don't worry, Centennial College has you covered! Even before enrolling in Centennial College, here is the text of the complete article. Wait a minute! What am I talking about? Reproducing the whole article... That sounds like...