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Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract
CheatingThomas Lancaster & Robert Clarke
Birmingham City UniversityHEA STEM Conference 2014
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Contract Cheating
A student uses a third party to produce academic work for them
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Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At
Birmingham City University
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Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At
Birmingham City University
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Turnitin
Turnitin is a text matching service, used to identify students copying from external services and colluding with other students
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Contract Cheating
Work produced using contract cheating is original, so Turnitin will not identify sources for this work
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Attribution
The challenging process where a contract cheating detective tries to identify the university that student contract cheating requests found online are fromMost of our work is based around the Freelancer.com
agency site
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Some Success
Running student contract cheating requests through Turnitin has started to show interesting results for a small number cases
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Turnitin Example 1
Large match to assignment brief
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Turnitin Example 2
Multiple small hits from the same source
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Turnitin Example 3
No matches when first posted
But received request to view from another university when
it matched one of their assignments
2 months later
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Turnitin Example 4
Turnitin Report from Posting in Jan 2014
Shows that same stock assignment has been used before in previous years
Brainmass.com provides stock
answers
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Turnitin Example 5a
Freelancer request to re-write assignment
Source located by Turnitin
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Turnitin Example 5b
We try to follow up other postings.
This was made by the same person as before and matches the same source
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Turnitin Example 6
Multiple sources for
EdExcel courses
Example of “false positive”
matches
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Turnitin Example 7
Turnitin also matches public
web sites
Particularly useful if “old data” not found by Google
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Turnitin Example 8
Multiple hits, but no response to
Turnitin requests
Possible problems:Staff Turnover
University no longer registered with Turnitin
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Current Use
Turnitin is now allowing contract cheating detectives to attribute work that has not been identified using other methods29% success rate based on sample in paper
Recommendation – academics should load all assignment specifications into Turnitin
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Resources
Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_cheating
Contract Cheating Special Interest Group (supported by the Higher Education Academy):https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CONTRACTCHEATING
Materials from recent HEA STEM Contract Cheating Workshop:http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/13_March_Computing_Contract_Birmingham
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For More Information
Thomas LancasterEmail: [email protected]: http://thomaslancaster.co.ukTwitter: @DrLancaster
Robert ClarkeEmail: [email protected]
Slides Available Athttp://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster