One clue is that the overwhelming majority of the papers were ostensibly written by authors who claim to be affiliated with Chinese institutions. Universities in China often reward researchers for publishing in notable journals listed on the Science Citation Index, in some cases paying them cash bonuses, though China’s science and education ministries have recently tried to crack down on the practice. It’s also long been a requirement that doctoral students at many Chinese universities publish a paper before they graduate.
Plagiarism and the lack of academic integrity it engenders are intricately connected to the larger debate about intellectual property rights (IPR) in China and the government’s promoted idea of a harmonious society to support stability.
The specific AI — GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 — was released in June 2020 by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors.
According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning — the ability to understand what they’re writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a “C” average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment.
Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic.
“If you Google something like essay help and Stanford,” Ridolfo said, “you’ll get school content injected by essay mills or find pages that redirect you to their services.”
block the SQL injections and to set regular scans for additional paper mill intrusions.
hese intrusions were from just 14 known cheating providers when there are probably hundreds of them.
this pattern of hacking legitimate university property to sell cheating services could get much more complex and much more dangerous.
Since cheating is a billion-dollar, global dark market, it’s not surprising. It’s just awful. And schools should move quickly to address it, not just with patches, but with policy and policing.
I am ringing the alarm.
We have now found >400 papers that all share a very similar title layout, graph layout, and (most importantly) the same Western blot layout.
This is a massive #PaperMill of (what we assume) fabricated data.
Three Things Teachers Need to Spot—and Stop—Plagiarism
SPONSORED CONTENTFROM PLAGIARISMCHECK
my note: I firmly disagree with the corporate push to mechanize plagiarism. Plagiarism is about teaching both faculty and students, and this industry, under the same cover is trying to make a profit by mechanizing, not teaching about plagiarism.
Plagiarism-detection software can address the most pressing needs of classroom educators faced with assessing students’ written work. Here’s how:
1. Teachers Need More Time
The Challenge: The larger the class is, and the more students that are in it, the longer it takes to review each written assignment—checking grammar, style, originality of ideas, etc. This is especially important when screening for plagiarism.
My note: this is NOT true. If the teacher is still lingering in the old habits of lecturing, this could be true. However, when a teacher gets into the habit of reviewing papers, s/he can detect as soon as in the first several paragraphs the discrepancies due to copy and paste of other work versus the student’s work.
In addition, if the teacher applies group work in her/his class, s/he can organize students to proofread each other’s work, thus teaching them actively about plagiarism, punctuation etc.
2. Evidence Must Be Reliable
The Challenge: When identifying plagiarism, teachers need to be confident in their assessment. Accusing students of academic dishonesty is a weighty claim; it can lead to their suspension or even expulsion from school.
My note: another myth perpetuated by industry searching for profit. Instead of looking at the process of plagiarism as punitive action, an educator will look at it as education and prevention. Prevention of plagiarism will never be successful, if the focus as in this article is on “suspension,” “expulsion,” etc. The goal of the teacher is NOT to catch the student, but to work with the student and understand the complexity of plagiarism.
3. Tools Must Be Easy to Use
My note: right, the goal is to make the teacher think as less as possible.
My note: PlagiarismCheck is the same as TurnitIn and all other tools, which seek profit, not education. Considering that plagiarism is a moving target (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/01/10/plagiarism-or-collaboration/) and it is a concept first and secondly an action, the attempt to extract profits from the mechanization of this process is no less corrupt then the attempt to focus on profit (of education) rather then on education (itself)
Ercegovac, Z., & Richardson, J. J. (2004). Academic Dishonesty, Plagiarism Included, in the Digital Age: A Literature Review. College & Research Libraries, 65(4), 301-318.
what constitutes plagiarism, how prevalent plagiarism is in our schools, colleges, and society, what is done to prevent and reduce plagiarism, the attitudes of faculty toward academic dishonesty in general, and individual differences as predictors of academic dishonesty
the interdisciplinary nature of the topic and the ethical challenges of accessing and using information technology, especially in the age of the Internet. Writings have been reported in the literatures of education, psychology, and library and information studies, each looking at academic dishonesty from different perspectives. The literature has been aimed at instructors and scholars in education and developmental psychology, as well as college librarians and school media specialists.
Although the literature appears to be scattered across many fields, standard dictionaries and encyclopedias agree on the meaning of plagiarism.
According to Webster’s, plagiarism is equated with kidnapping and defined as “the unauthorized use of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own.”(FN10) The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarism as the “wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.).”(
plagiarism is an elusive concept and has been treated differently in different contexts.
different types of plagiarism: direct plagiarism; truncation (where strings are deleted in the beginning or ending); excision (strings are deleted from the middle of sentences); insertions; inversions; substitutions; change of tense, person, number, or voice; undocumented factual information; inappropriate use of quotation marks; or paraphrasing.
defined plagiarism as a deliberate use of “someone else’s language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source.”(FN30) This definition is extended to printed and digital materials, manuscripts, and other works. Plagiarism is interrelated to intellectual property, copyright, and authorship, and is discussed from the perspective of multiculturalism.(FN31)
Jeffrey Klausman made three distinctions among direct plagiarism, paraphrase plagiarism, and patchwork plagiarism
+++++++++++++++
Cosgrove, J., Norelli, B., & Putnam, E. (2005). Setting the Record Straight: How Online Database Providers Are Handling Plagiarism and Fabrication Issues. College & Research Libraries, 66(2), 136-148.
None of the database providers used links for corrections. Although it is true that the structure of a particular database (LexisNexis, for instance) may make static links more difficult to create than appending corrections, it is a shame that the most elemental characteristic of online resources–the ability to link–is so underutilized within the databases themselves.
Finding reliable materials using online databases is difficult enough for students, especially undergraduates, without having to navigate easily fixed pitfalls. The articles in this study are those most obviously in need of a correction or a link to a correction–articles identified by the publications themselves as being flawed by error, plagiarism, or fabrication. Academic librarians instruct students to carefully evaluate the literature in their campuses’ database resources. Unfortunately, it is not practical to expect undergraduate students to routinely search at the level necessary to uncover corrections and retractions nor do librarians commonly have the time to teach those skills.
NC – no competitor can take our work and use it against us.
faculty can use anything in F2F, which is lawfully obtained. Flickr, photo without violating the regulations, it can be used in a PPT, but only on a F2F classroom. In OER, it needs to be revised.
Gary can share a “media release” form (slid 17).
Open Textbook Institute (Kimberly Johnson)
++++++++++++++++++
Shane Nackerud and Matthew Lee
use of Pressbooks (it is open source). Minitex pays a vendor to host it, but it can be hosted locally, because it is open source
https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/
Minnesota Library Publishing Project – partner ship between Minitex and public libraries.
The proper solution to plagiarism in our nation’s schools is education and vigilance. Students should understand the role of academic integrity inside their own work, and be held accountable when they are not in accordance with academic policies and honor codes. Self-plagiarism, incorrect citations, no citations, or even word for word copying must be taught to students on a regular basis. Updates to both MLA and APA are ongoing as well; therefor, even graduates must stay current with how their citation methods change overtime.
My response to this LInkedIn entry:
Here is most of the information, I have collected on plagiarism, academic integrity, academic dishonesty. I added also Joshe’s opinion LinkedIn entry: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
My firm conviction through the years is that for-profit such as TurnitIn are a smoke-screen, opportunists, which are trying to bank on lack of organized approach toward educating students and ourselves about the increasing nebulous areas of plagiarism (due to the increasing digitization of our work). It is in their interest to use scare tactics and try to convince us that computerization is the answer. Anyone, who had proofread papers for more than two semesters can detect easily the change of style, the lack of punctuation and other little, but significant details in the writing process. Since, the instructor has to read the paper for content anyhow, it is just preposterous to seek multiple-thousand dollars software license to replace the instructor.
The literature shows that the predominant percentage of students committing plagiarism is doing it due to lack of proper explanation and education. I that sense, I support Josh’s choice of words: education and vigilance. My only addition is that the vigilance must be human based, not machine-based. Higher admin shouldn’t squander finances in purchasing more licenses and cutting faculty positions, but invest in well-rounded and capable faculty.