University steps up bid to halt cheating

Universities will soon all be using anti-plagiarism software to weed out cheating students – the not-so-smart ones at least – after Otago University closed ranks.

Otago University's senate voted to make SafeAssign, one of two widely used anti-plagiarism software systems, available to academic staff from next year.

It is the last university to turn to technology to crack down on copying.

The software, which is designed to check whether students' assignments have been cut and pasted, is now starting to find its way into some schools.

Auckland independent school Strathallan College uses SafeAssign to check all work submitted to its English department.

ICT director Matthew Humber, writing in Interface magazine, said the mere suggestion that work would be checked was enough to dissuade students from "gambling with their grades".

Education Ministry group manager Colin McGregor says the ministry has no plans to supply similar software to state schools, and does not provide advice to schools on its use.

SafeAssign can check work against publicly available documents on the internet, assignments that have previously been submitted to an institution, and a global database of student work checked by the software system.

Otago University will not use the last feature, fearing "the potential complexities" that could arise from allegations that students had plagiarised material from other academic institutions.

The software displays the proportion of any work it believes may have been plagiarised as a percentage, highlighting and identifying the sources for any copied text.

The university plans to make the online software available to students from 2011.

It acknowledges there is a risk that some might use it to test what changes were needed to pass off a cribbed assignment as an original.

The Times reported last year that that was a problem in Britain, and that Cranfield and Keele universities had acknowledged students had cottoned on to the fact they could beat anti-plagiarism software by using a thesaurus to change the wording of copied texts.

That did not impress the United States' Inquirer.

"Against all odds, students are proving that despite the quantities of booze consumed daily 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," it commented.

"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 course work to the program to see if it still picks up any trace of plagiarism."

Anti-plagiarism software usually costs universities tens of thousands of dollars a year, but Otago University will be able to use SafeAssign free under an existing licensing agreement for its Blackboard learning management system.

Victoria University has the other widely used anti-plagiarism package, Turnitin, developed by Californian company iParadigms, which it has used since 2004.

Stephen Marshall, acting director of the university's Teaching Development Centre, says use of the software is up to each course co-ordinator and students are notified if it is being used.