Universities limit the use of anti-plagiarism software

SNEAKY STUDENTS USING plagiarism-detection software to cover up their cheating ways have ironically led to universities now calling for policies limiting the software’s use.

Universities, catching on to the sheer amounts of plagiarism going on in Academia, had been asking students to submit their papers and dissertations through programs like ‘Turnitin’ which checks the ‘work’ for any tell-tale signs of copy pasting or wikipedia-ing.

But against all odds, students are proving that despite the quantities of booze consumed on a daily basis to cope with the stress of a 10-hour week, some of their frazzled brain cells remain alive, and even capable of coming up with sophisticated ways of beating the system.

By sophisticated, we mean the devious degree seekers use Microsoft Word’s thesaurus option to change words and sentence structure around a bit before resubmitting their coursework to the program to see if it still picks up any trace of plagarism. Sounds like pure dedication and hard work to us.

Cranfield University was the first to take issue with the phenomenon, writing a new rulebook that decreed that students could only submit papers through Turnitin once, meaning they’d have to be much more thorough with the use of thesaurus before hand.

Head of the Learning Development Unit at Keele University, Stephen Bostock, admitted his university had had problems with plagiarism software abuse. "We have had one or two cases where students had open-ended access and did seem to be progressively resubmitting work to get rid of the 'coloured' bits. It becomes a bit of a game, but it is not a very educationally useful one," he lectured.

But other academics have leapt to the students’ defence, with some going as far as to plagarise a paper to be presented at the Third International Plagiarism Conference at Northumbria University (we were invited) calling for restrictions on Turnitin’s use to be lifted immediately.

It is thought that, along with arguing that writing original papers would simply take up far too much student beer-drinking time, "A policy change of this magnitude was worrying since there was no evidence to support the suggestion that Turnitin had been subverted in this way." Synonyms of subvert also include ‘undermine’, ‘challenge’, ‘threaten’, ‘weaken’, ‘destabilise’, and ‘sabotage’,. And there is apparently no evidence that any of those sins have been committed by the earnest, hardworking students either.

The paper also argues that limiting use of the software would go against the whole point of university which is purportedly to imbue a "sense of personal responsibility and academic integrity in its students".

Oh. And we thought the point was to laze around in dirty underwear racking up mountainous student loan debts and drinking oneself into a stupour. How silly of us. µ

L’Inq
Times Higher Education