Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating

Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating Thomas Lancaster & Robert Clarke Birmingham City University HEA STEM Conference 2014

Contract Cheating • A student uses a third party to produce academic work for them

Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At Birmingham City University

Turnitin • Turnitin is a text matching service, used to identify students copying from external services and colluding with other students

Contract Cheating • Work produced using contract cheating is original, so Turnitin will not identify sources for this work

Attribution • The challenging process where a contract cheating detective tries to identify the university that student contract cheating requests found online are from • Most of our work is based around the Freelancer.com agency site

Some Success • Running student contract cheating requests through Turnitin has started to show interesting results for a small number cases

Turnitin Example 1 Large match to assignment brief

Turnitin Example 2 Multiple small hits from the same source

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

Turnitin Example 4 Brainmass.com provides stock answers Turnitin Report from Posting in Jan 2014 Shows that same stock assignment has been used before in previous years

Turnitin Example 5a Freelancer request to re-write assignment Source located by Turnitin

Turnitin Example 5b We try to follow up other postings. This was made by the same person as before and matches the same source

Turnitin Example 6 Multiple sources for EdExcel courses Example of “false positive” matches

Turnitin Example 7 Turnitin also matches public web sites Particularly useful if “old data” not found by Google

Turnitin Example 8 Multiple hits, but no response to Turnitin requests Possible problems: Staff Turnover University no longer registered with Turnitin

Current Use • Turnitin is now allowing contract cheating detectives to attribute work that has not been identified using other methods • 29% success rate based on sample in paper • Recommendation – academics should load all assignment specifications into Turnitin

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

For More Information • Thomas Lancaster • Email: thomas.lancaster@bcu.ac.uk • Website: http://thomaslancaster.co.uk • Twitter: @DrLancaster • Robert Clarke • Email: robert.clarke@bcu.ac.uk • Slides Available At • http://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster

Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating

Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating

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