How to prove/deal with plagiarism that is hidden behind bad synonyms?

Question

I have had more than one undergraduate student who I have very strongly suspected of routine plagiarism that I cannot prove. There is a certain style of writing that is just inexplicable except as an effort to avoid plagiarism detection.

I will give an example from a case I was actually able to prove. The student wrote:

Free enterprise prejudice is changing in the current period as another U.S. racial conviction framework at a moment that African Americans are a vigorously urbanized, broadly scattered, and occupationally heterogeneous group; when state arrangement is formally race nonpartisan and focused on anti discrimination endeavors; and when most white Americans lean toward a more volitional and social, rather than innate and organic, translation of blacks' burdened status.

This was clearly an attempt to plagiarize from one of the readings in the course:

Laissez Faire Racism is crystallizing in the current period as a new American racial belief system at a point when African Americans are a heavily urbanized, nationally dispersed and occupationally heterogeneous population; when state policy is formally race-neutral and committed to anti-discrimination; and when most white Americans prefer a more volitional and cultural, as opposed to inherent and biological, interpretation of blacks' disadvantaged status.

This kind of plagiarism is totally missed by SafeAssign, the detection tool that I have access to. When I am able to prove cases like this, it's only with much effort. Of course, I can just give students F for writing incoherently, but I would like to have these students removed from the course. I can only do it if I can prove the plagiarism.

Can anyone recommend any strategies for dealing with this?

EDIT: I of course do try to explain to the student that this is not an appropriate way to paraphrase. They typically say that they understand... and then they do the exact same thing on the next assignment.

Answer 1

To me it is not obvious that your example is a "clearly an attempt to plagiarize". It looks to me like an attempt to paraphrase. Most students that I see who cheat are too lazy to be bothered to change any words. If the original source was referenced, I would not pursue the academic misconduct route. Instead I would give a poor mark for writing incoherently and not showing any depth of understanding. I might also focus an activity on proper paraphrasing and how paraphrasing does not generally demonstrate depth of understanding.

If the source of the paraphrased/copied material was not referenced, then the situation is more difficult. I would probably first consider if the simple lack of a reference is academic misconduct independent of the copied material. If it is not, then you need to decide if the two actions are academic misconduct. Again, I would probably give the benefit of the doubt and conduct a referencing activity. After the activity, I would let the hammer fall.

Answer 2

Moss page states:

it shouldn't matter whether the suspect code was first discovered by Moss or by a human; the case that there was plagiarism should stand on its own.

If you want an automated method of discovering every cheat, wait until the Singularity. Lazy students will always find the way to get past the alarms with minimal work. You can spend months making your software understand synonyms, and they will just spend ten more minutes reordering the sentences.

I think you have sufficient evidence to start the procedures, it doesn't matter it was you or the software who detected it. Anyway, I hope there are not too many individuals like this, in which case you should do something public education at a larger scale.

Also, consider having a talk with the student. Maybe he doesn't think that it is plagiarism.

Answer 3

Well, in this case it sounds like you caught the plagiarism without needing to use the software. How? Because the student plagiarized from one of the course readings, and as it happens you are very familiar with the course readings.

It seems to me that this "human plagiarism catching" can be generalized: you don't have to be able to have software to trawl the internet for copying if you yourself know -- or even have a sufficiently good idea -- which material is likely to be plagiarized. In my experience the average student is remarkably bad at getting academic information from the internet: they don't know enough to rapidly and accurately sift through the deluge, so they hold tight to whatever was high on the first google search screen and succeed or fail accordingly. If you are concerned about plagiarism, I think it would be time well spent to search the internet before making the assignment and bookmark the most plausible sources to be plagiarized. This won't catch everyone, but then again nothing will. If you feel strongly enough, you might even design some initial assignments as "plagiarism bait". As long as your goal is to teach your students right and wrong rather than a priori to get them in trouble, I think this is an entirely justifiable thing to do. Also showing someone that they have already gotten caught and gotten in some trouble can be a great motivator for keeping their nose clean in the future (or, sure, digging much deeper in their dishonesty, but again one has to play the percentages here).

Good luck. I don't work in a field in which plagiarism in papers is common -- I am a mathematician -- and the idea that university students regularly commit such dishonorable acts disgusts me. Anyone who wants to take a harder line (and of course who informs and educates the students in advance) has my full support.

Answer 4

If I was the instructor...

I would first strike out all wordiness: e.g. in the current period; at a moment; or... at the present time etc. There are numerous "wordy" lists available on the Internet that you can refer to for this part.

Then, to detect hard to prove plagiarism, I would search only on significant or weighty phrases and ignore the adjective fluff--except for superlatives and qualifiers (few, most, many--which many students/people have trouble changing into different words).

Focus on phrases that wouldn't seem to matter to a student who is copying, rather than comprehending/understanding what he/she reads... like "most people", "few people", "many Americans", "few Blacks", etc. Also focus on the "meat"--phrases that students would strive to retain because it sounds more sophisticated or more academic.

So from the student example, I would pull out phrases like these, adding plus signs between them: U.S. racial+urbanized+occupationally heterogeneous+anti discrimination+most white Americans+blacks'+status [blacks' as plural possessive]

Put only that string of select words and phrases into Google.

The second Google hit shows enough resemblance--all the words are present. That hit goes to Google Books: Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, pg. 18 edited by Steven A. Tuch, Jack K. Martin

In other words, don't take a student's full sentence to use when checking Google. Instead, pull out phrases that sound like the student is a professor-wannabe, words the student would rarely or very rarely string together based on the student's age, college level, past writing assignments, past academic performance, speaking habits, etc. For example, if a 19 yr old with a C-average turned in that mess, I'd immediately think "plagiarized!"

For in class teaching strategies, professors might assign speaking presentations early in the course. As each student presents orally, write on an index card the student's style and speaking level. e.g. Notes like: uses simple words; no sophistication; uses few/too many adjectives; uses good analogies; noun/pronoun-verb conflicts like "He run" instead of "He ran". The cards will be a reference for you when evaluating writing assignments throughout the course.

A second teaching strategy: Print out a paragraph from a textbook, say 5 sentences long, with a copy for each student. Make it 'count'--assign grades for this exercise. Have them silently read it. Instructions: Turn the paper over and don't look at it again. In 3 to 4 sentences (reduced from 5) write "in your own words" what the author said. You may not use any significant phrases or adjectives from the original text except identifiers like age, gender, nationality, etc. (Men; women; middle-aged; American; Canadian, etc.) You may not simply replace words in the original with synonyms. [Alternate assignment: Same instructions but they may refer to the original and give permission to reuse only 3 significant words or phrases from the original version. If more than 3 are used, it will result in an F for the exercise.]

Teaching strategy #3: Review good class note-taking. Specifically instruct the students to take notes for this class. Teach for 15-20 minutes. Stop and pick several students to refer to their notes and re-tell the class the main points you made but they must put the ideas into complete sentences. Their version must re-tell what you taught, as closely as possible. After several students share their retelling, review with the class how "important pieces" in lecture notetaking is similar to the task of "paraphrasing" points from texts. Talk about how hearing significant pieces from your lecture for notetaking purposes uses the same skills they need to also 'hear' /listen for significant words/phrases in texts. Discuss why they must use "phrase quotes" on significant pieces when paraphrasing for a writing assignment, in addition to sentence quotes. And discuss attribution for both.

I enjoyed writing this and hope it sparks further ideas.

Answer 5

It looks like this student was aware of the "five consecutive word plagiarism rule."

S/he is copying strings of four words or so, and taking care to change the fifth (and maybe sixth) in sequence, (hence the "bad synonyms") then goes back to copying another "string," etc. Assuming that you know the underlying material, that's how to detect it.

As explained in other answers to my question, plagiarism consists of "lifting ideas, plots" as opposed to merely words. Your student is violating the spirit of anti-plagiarism rules while conforming to the letter (or trying to).

Answer 6

Detecting plagiarism has two parts. The first part is to find a possible match, and the second part is to compare the two works. Plagiarism is likely when a work is very similar to one specific prior work, and much less similar to other works.

The problem with SafeAssign here is unknown. It could be that it fails to find a possible match, or it might find the two works dissimilar.

We recognize the two paragraphs from the question as similar because the sentence structures are almost identical, many words are identical, and where the words differ they're synonyms. But you had the advantage of recognizing which text it came from. This part could in fact be automated without major problems.

The main challenge for automated plagiarism detection is the selection of similar candidates. This probably needs to be done on multiple scales. First, transform the text by doing a grammar analysis. Replace any noun by literally "noun", any verb by "verb" etc, and see if you now find long matches. Secondly, replace all words by canonical synonyms or hypernyms and check for matches of smaller length. (It doesn't matter if the text becomes hard to understand or somewhat nonsensical). Finally, for the smallest scale, just sort lists or enumerations.

Taking one step back, how would a plagiarism detector come up with likely candidates in the first place? A good method is to realize that documents about the same subject will typically both use fairly uncommon words. As a simple example, the word "God" is rather common in theological works and much less so in theoretical chemistry. This process will still work as an effective filter for the pair given in the question - both are trivially recognized as sociological works by their word choice alone (disregarding any sentence structure).

Answer 7

I give an oral quiz to each of my students, not to find plagiarism but to assess understanding of the material. I pay close attention when a student of whom I believe to have "paraphrased" their entire paper. I'm a science teacher which puts me at an advantage. if the student can't comment on any of the challenging concepts, I find it suspicious.