"Finding Applicants Who Plagiarize "

TheGFG
Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:13:50 +0000

The summer before freshman year of high school, kids taking honors English had to read a novel and take critical notes on it. My S did the assignment with integrity, ie. with no “help.” His work was apparently flagged, however, by one of these anti-plagiarism programs. Without closely examining S’s work as compared with the alleged copied source, the teacher accused him outright of plagiarism. S denied the charge vehemently, and then because he didn’t confess he was sent to his counselor’s office. There, the counselor tried to cajole him into admitting his dishonestly. S continued to deny it and got angry because no one believed him. He asked to be shown what he supposedly had copied from, which was an online source. It turned out that there was nothing at all about his work which even remotely resembled that source as far as note-taking style or even the vast majority of the content.

I had to get involved, and so we printed out the online notes and compared with S’s work word by word. They were only similar to the extent you’d expect when two people are writing about the exact same topic. But it turned out that there was one 7-word phrase that both my S and the other author had quoted from the novel. However, it was a very important sentence which embodied the book’s theme. Anyone intelligent writing about the book would have quoted that line. It was a ridiculous travesty.

Based on that one similarity, the school made a wrong assumption and an unfounded accusation. I should mention that S is Hispanic, and apparently the teacher thought his work was “too good” to have been done by an Hispanic boy, so that probably predisposed her to assume dishonestly even in the absence of compelling evidence.

So my opinion is that these programs are only as good as the people who interpret the results, and therefore must be used very, very carefully.