A New Way To Help Students Turn in Their Best Work (www.blog.google) 40
Google announces in a blog post: Today's students face a tricky challenge: In an age when they can explore every idea imaginable on the internet, how do they balance outside inspiration with authenticity in their own work? Students have to learn to navigate the line between other people's ideas and their own, and how and when to properly cite sources. We've heard from instructors that they copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if student work is authentic, which can be repetitive, inefficient and biased. They also often spend a lot of time giving feedback about missed citations and improper paraphrasing. By integrating the power of Search into our assignment and grading tools, we can make this quicker and easier.
That's why Google is introducing originality reports. This new feature -- with several reports included free in every course -- will be part of Classroom and Assignments, which was also announced today. We create originality reports by scanning student work for matched phrases across hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. When assigning work in Classroom and Assignments, instructors will have the option to enable originality reports. Students will then be able to run up to three originality reports on documents they attach to the assignment before submitting their work. This heads-up gives students an opportunity to proactively improve their work, and also saves time for instructors.
That's why Google is introducing originality reports. This new feature -- with several reports included free in every course -- will be part of Classroom and Assignments, which was also announced today. We create originality reports by scanning student work for matched phrases across hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. When assigning work in Classroom and Assignments, instructors will have the option to enable originality reports. Students will then be able to run up to three originality reports on documents they attach to the assignment before submitting their work. This heads-up gives students an opportunity to proactively improve their work, and also saves time for instructors.
Requires sign-up (Score:1)
Sounds pretty interesting, would love to give it a try on some texts but not nearly enough to sign up for any beta to use it.
Already Exists (Score:3)
Every school has been using services to check for originality for years.
The reason they don't let students check in advance is so they can't try to beat the system.
"Originality" has nothing to do with sources. It has everything to do with writing ideas in your own words and combining disparate ideas into a new idea.
You're supposed to read books and read opinions on a matter before putting your now educated opinion on paper.
Students don't "accidentally" plagiarize. If you feel the need to copy and paste extensively, you haven't put enough thought into the subject you are writing about.
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Students don't accidentally commit real plagiarism, but "academic" plagiarism is an entirely different story and very easily happens accidentally. That's not even getting into the people who somehow think it's possible to deliberately commit cryptomnesia.
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"academic" plagiarism is an entirely different story and very easily happens accidentally.
What is "academic" plagiarism? I don't think it's easy to construct an identical sentence to someone else, let alone three entire paragraphs.
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Academic plagiarism is essentially failing to cite your sources. It doesn't matter whether the text is identical, paraphrased, or completely rewritten; if you incorporate information or concepts from another work and you don't cite that work as the source then it's considered plagiarised.
will turnitin.com sue over Originality Reports (Score:2)
will turnitin.com sue over Originality Reports with some kind of trade mark bs?
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To find student sharing parts of work within the same class.
To find a student to found free "work" online and did a full copy.
A person who wrote the "average" paper and sold it all over the USA.
The problem been the "detection" company also got the exact same copy to compare
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Lies. You are supposed to get a passing grade and nothing else. Different teachers vagaries and idiosyncrasies and of course student favourites will define the grade you get. Pay attention to the course notes prepared by the teacher, align with their displayed preferences and try to write like them.
Use wikipedia for background and of course links to referable material do not ever reference wikipedia itself (if you can pick the teachers favourite authors, check course notes, always reference them).
You are s
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I did it wrong. I tried to understand the subject matter and engage it in my writing to provide insight and deliver an appropriate response to the request at hand.
Still, it got me a good degree and taught me useful skills (around analysis, learning and writing) that I'm still using now.
Seeking a passing grade would've taught me how to get a passing grade. I've worked with many people that were taught that at university and they're all fucking useless.
Good students will often come up with similar work (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because 2 really good students across the internet came up with a similar paper on the anthropomorphism of vehicles in sales figures through from 1920 to 2019 does not necessitate copying. Nor should one student have to change his or her paper. In performing this task, we are bypassing due process and assuming that a machine can identify when someone has plagiarized and are now creating an atmosphere of fear in what should be free speech. There has to be some limit to this. Teachers are responsible. A machine is not. Yet, given this technology, teachers will become bureaucrats that administer the justice of the machine instead of teaching. T
his is not a step forwards to combating plagiarism but rather a step backwards in the freedom of though and expression and the assumption of innocence until PROVEN guilty by a jury of ones peers. A teacher can be a stand in for a peer, but a machine most definitely cannot when it is comparing notes from across the web without distinction. For a crime to be committed, there has to be intent, motive, opportunity and evidence.
A good student has no intent nor motive to do so and just because the opportunity exists does not mean it was taken. And lastly, the analysis of a machine is circumstantial at best and just plain wrong at worst and we are now going to take it as gospel and ask students to change brilliant work to something less exemplery just because it happens to be close to a different work. How is this process even being reviewed? Who is the jury that decides the analysis was even correct? Are we to change our work because a mechanical overseer thinks we stole it?
Case in point. Who invented Calculus? Who discovered the right triangle? Who discovered that the sun was the center of the solar system? These works would be considered a plagiarism by a machine but they were created by independent inquiry. What about case law? What about clean room reverse engineering?
Just because we can automate something doesn't mean we should Especially when it comes to teaching.
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his is not a step forwards...
Small correction in paragraph 2. "This" not "his"
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Unfortunately, this is how it starts. But the slippery slope exists.
Allow me to demonstrate:
Copyrights are meant to protect authors
Copyrights get extended and more draconian
Copyright violations are detected by humans and reported
Copyright violations overload humans and so computers are used and humans arbitrate
Copyright violations are automated with humans providing backup mediation for resolving conflict
Copyright violations are fully automated and only a select few are channelled to human arbitration
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It's a tried and true axiom: Not everything that can be automated should be.
Not sure where you got this, but it's not one I've heard before and it's bullshit anyway.
You point out some issues with automation, especially bad implementations, but none of the benefits.
If you automate plagiarism detection you get a number of real benefits. First and foremost, it frees the teacher up to focus on the quality of the work, without the distraction of wondering if the kid wrote it or not. The cognitive load of assessing student work is fairly high. Reducing this means you get better grading.
T
Good teachers recognize individual students' work (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe I know each of you well enough to know what grade you deserve in this class. If you believe I know you well enough, you don't need to take the final. If you think I don't know you well enough, you're welcome to take the final and prove me wrong.
He had no use for some google phrase-matcher. He worked with us closely enough that he knew exactly what our strengths and weaknesses were.
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But how shitty is that? Grading shouldn't be based on a teacher's intuition. Grading should be based on measurable progress.
There's no way around it, even the best and most well-meaning teachers will have subconscious favorites and prejudices, and their guessed-out grades will reflect them. This has actually been empirically tested. Another interesting empiric test is teachers who say they "randomly" call on students, will call on students with strong racial and gender biases.
Regardless, even if you had
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Yeah, I had a lecturer that really hated my approach to learning. She should've been glad I even turned up to her lectures, as I skipped most of her colleagues' ones, but I knew I wasn't picking up her material as easily and she wasn't a bad lecturer.
Instead she kept getting pissed that I would pay little obvious attention to her, that I didn't bother with the seminars, that I didn't tell her how wonderful she was. If she'd been giving grades based on her perspective of the students I'd have failed my degre
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Near the end of one of the best classes I had in college, the professor told us:
I believe I know each of you well enough to know what grade you deserve in this class. If you believe I know you well enough, you don't need to take the final. If you think I don't know you well enough, you're welcome to take the final and prove me wrong.
He had no use for some google phrase-matcher. He worked with us closely enough that he knew exactly what our strengths and weaknesses were.
Here is what would happen today. A number of students would not take the final and fail. They would then complain to the dean, student ombudsman, and anyone else that would listen. Faced with this many student complaints, the professor would face a verbal reprimand (more if he had done it before), be told to change the failing grades of students who didn't take the final to passing grades, and be required to give a universal final exam from then on.
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And that's as it should be.
Seriously, the GP's "if I know you well enough I'll pass you" 90% of the time is going to be "if you've kissed my ass enough and/or have big tits". It absolutely is not a valid way to determine a student's grade.
I've spent way too much time in college in my life, and I've had classes with brilliant assholes and smoking hot morons. Neither their personalities nor their looks should be a factor in how well they do in a class. Only whether or not they understand the material and if s
Turnitin and other scams have been around forever (Score:2)
Unless someone's literally copying and pasting work they're more or less useless. Firstly because there's only so many ways to word something and 7 billion goddamn people in the world, and secondly since their core business model would fall apart if they didn't regularly reinvigorate the Plagiarism Panic you'd better damn well believe they will find someone regularly. Even if they have to lie to do it. After all who's the teacher going to trust, and how is the student going to ever prove their innocence? Ne
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You have no idea what you're talking about. As a teacher, turnitin.com will match plagiarism not with a random student across the country, but with another student at the same school. A quick double check and discussion with the students makes it completely obvious what happened.
Of course different students will have very similar ideas. But there is a 0% chance that different students will word these ideas in the same way.
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Yep. My wife has to use TurnItIn for the online classes she teaches. Every semester, a few idiots will exactly copy either an entire paper, or significant sections of one. TurnItIn can exactly match it to who wrote it, and when. It gives a nice percentage of what is plagiarized. 100% is just plain cheating, and usually involves someone else in the class, or who took the class recently.
- Necron69
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TurnItIn admin and teacher and student checking in here.
TII will tell you if the part of the paper in question came from *any* other school in their system, the internet, etc. If it came from your school, it will identify the course title used, and student. If it came from any other school, there is a method to ask the instructor of the source course/student for information.
I've seen it used badly - like forgetting to select the "ignore bibliography" option and failing a whole class because you gave a lim
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Just for giggles I put the CC BY-NC-SA license on all of the papers
this is literally just for giggles because when you signed on that dotted line to get into school you signed an agreement which nullifies the CC license. also folks who plagurize from stackoverflow never cite sources could find themselves in hot water for failing to follow the signed agreement. so while your hate is valid, it is simply misplaced on the scale. your beef is with legal, who came up with the agreement which allows for the school to use your work as they see fit (including the TOS of third-pa
Slashvertisement (Score:2)
Original? (Score:1)
Today's students face a tricky challenge: In an age when they can explore every idea imaginable on the internet, how do they balance outside inspiration with authenticity in their own work? Students have to learn to navigate the line between other people's ideas and their own, and how and when to properly cite sources. We've heard from instructors that they copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if student work is authentic, which can be repetitive, inefficient and biased. They also often spend
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Name one institution... (Score:2)
...that doesn't provide extensive academic writing support including how to use bibliography managers & the do's & don'ts of quoting & citing sources. This isn't an issue that technology can address. This is about informing & training students well.
Also, most institutions already provide online plagiarism analysis services integrated with their online essay submission systems. Manual searches of random bits of text from students' writing isn't a particularly effective way to identify plagiar
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Wrong books used and quoted get detected as biased?
Wrong history, politics, speeches, FBI data sets, crime stats
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I got the sense this is additional functionality being added to a service already provided by Google.
Saves their customers needing a second supplier, gives them a stronger product to sell to new customers, helps them compete against someone that might otherwise be taking sales from them.