Sunday, 08 March 2009

"This must be what it feels like to be grading in Heaven next to Dr. Jesus."

Of all the joys of grading, this is by far the sweetest.  (Explained.)

Mar 8, 2009 6:00:17 PM | Teaching

7 Comments

The Modesto Kid

Need one ask for an explanation, or will one be forthcoming of its own accord?

Posted by: The Modesto Kid | Sunday, 08 March 2009 at 06:11 PM

SEK

Sorry, I somehow managed to forget all my readers aren't also teachers. Those are the results of Turnitin.com's originality reports for classes. The highest was an 11 percent, which means someone quoted a little too heavily from the Yale Film Analysis site, but I've got no actual cases of plagiarism to worry about. This is the first time in the last 10 or so quarters that I haven't had to worry the least little bit about plagiarism.

Posted by: SEK | Sunday, 08 March 2009 at 06:29 PM

The Modesto Kid

Ah, nice. Carry on.

Posted by: The Modesto Kid | Sunday, 08 March 2009 at 08:30 PM

Cranky

Uh, no it isn't. TurnItIn is now too well known. It doesn't cover googlebooks (and yes, they will turn it into a pdf, then turn the pdf into text rather than right a paper), and it increasingly does not cover materials found on cheathouse.com, peerpapers.com, etc. And the students are wise to it, using sites that manage to screen most of their contents from view by hiding the "summaries" of essays that can be downloaded. Still, if your students have been caught by TII until now, maybe you have had a breakthrough. And then, they can buy them. And they do, believe me.

Posted by: Cranky | Monday, 09 March 2009 at 06:58 PM

neznaika

Zero percent makes me nervous, unless it's an extremely rare text (in which case plagiarism is harder anyway: yay obscurity! And writing about film eliminates the quotation problem at least). There are some cheat sites that actually encode their papers so that what looks on the screen like normal text has character swapping for the turnitin scanner (e.g., every "e" is replaced by a non-ascii character so that there are no hits). You can check that by viewing the paper as displayed within turnitin. Back when I had turnitin access, I only ever had one paper turn up as a zero, and it was so very, very plagiarized...

Posted by: neznaika | Monday, 09 March 2009 at 11:30 PM

Luther Blissett

Yes to all of the above. Turninit is a useful resource for catching some simple plagiarizers, but a student who wants to plagiarize can just go the library and fine a print resource that's not available on-line.

And it cannot catch those who paraphrase ideas found online or in print without citation, which is a common high school move (often done innocently by kids who don't quite understand that plagiarism is not just about quotation marks and proper MLA citation). I teach the classics, so I've found myself getting familiar with the obvious study guides, so I can spot students who are relying heavily on Sparknotes or whathaveyou for their ideas.

Another method that often secures original work (and makes plagiarism stand out) is to create oddly framed assignments, i.e., write a letter to your sick grandmother from Menelaos explaining why regrets outweigh achievements. Even a clearly structured prompt will help push students to have to think for themselves: define heroism using the classical model for definitions (genus and differentiae); give three examples of heroism in the text with commentary and analysis; give three examples of un-heroic behavior with commentary and analysis; conclude with a statement explaining why certain values are considered heroic in the text.

Posted by: Luther Blissett | Tuesday, 10 March 2009 at 05:46 PM

Ahistoricality

context.

Some of their criticisms are pointless: they're true already even if no detection software is used. Some of them are simply nattering: nobody expects these systems to be perfect. Their marketing strategies, though, leave something to be desired.

Posted by: Ahistoricality | Friday, 13 March 2009 at 08:27 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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