I have been pondering the possibility of creating a distributed and collaborative system to detect plagiarism in assignments submitted by students in universities. No one can really trust the effectiveness of automated systems such as turnitin.com for as reliable as it is: its far from a perfect system. The lack of trust in automated systems results in graders having to manually ‘double-check’ the results to be sure that the results are reliable. What I propose is a collaborative plagiarism detection system where assignments are checked twice: once by a computer thereby eliminating clear insistences of lack of plagiarism and a second check made collaboratively by those who use such system.
The system will work by allowing graders to check as many sets of assignments as they wish(thought by the automated part of the system to be potentially plagiarized) and decided if it is plagiarized in their opinion or not. The key here however is that the sets shown to the grader should be no longer than a few lines long, this will eliminate bias based on content surrounding the scene of the potential crime. The effectiveness of this will be based on participation. The more graders that exist and the more sets that are evaluated the more effective it will be. Due to the short nature of each set it should take a very short moment for one to evaluate it and therefor creating a fast speedy system for identifying cheaters.
Jonathan Bailey said on April 16th, 2006:
It’s an interesting idea, but copyright law could be a significant barrier. It’s easy to forget that students own the copyright to the essays that they submit and, though most will accept their paper being run through an automated service, the comfort level goes down when you start introducing the idea of passing it around to other professors.
The more eyes that read a work, the more of a problem you could have with copyright issues.
Andre Cohen said on May 11th, 2006:
In the academic world this should not be an issue since it is understood that a person’s work should and must be reviewed before acceptance (be it for an assignment or academic journal). If a student cannot give this right to the academia, he might as well go to a community college where no one will care for his intellectual work.