@MyBCU #contractcheating 1 Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating Thomas Lancaster.

@MyBCU www.facebook.com/birminghamcityuniversity #contractcheating 1

Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract

CheatingThomas Lancaster & Robert Clarke

Birmingham City UniversityHEA STEM Conference 2014


Contract Cheating

A student uses a third party to produce academic work for them


Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At

Birmingham City University


Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At

Birmingham City University


Turnitin

Turnitin is a text matching service, used to identify students copying from external services and colluding with other students


Contract Cheating

Work produced using contract cheating is original, so Turnitin will not identify sources for this work


Attribution

The challenging process where a contract cheating detective tries to identify the university that student contract cheating requests found online are fromMost of our work is based around the Freelancer.com

agency site


Some Success

Running student contract cheating requests through Turnitin has started to show interesting results for a small number cases


Turnitin Example 1

Large match to assignment brief


Turnitin Example 2

Multiple small hits from the same source


Turnitin Example 3

No matches when first posted

But received request to view from another university when

it matched one of their assignments

2 months later


Turnitin Example 4

Turnitin Report from Posting in Jan 2014

Shows that same stock assignment has been used before in previous years

Brainmass.com provides stock

answers


Turnitin Example 5a

Freelancer request to re-write assignment

Source located by Turnitin


Turnitin Example 5b

We try to follow up other postings.

This was made by the same person as before and matches the same source


Turnitin Example 6

Multiple sources for

EdExcel courses

Example of “false positive”

matches


Turnitin Example 7

Turnitin also matches public

web sites

Particularly useful if “old data” not found by Google


Turnitin Example 8

Multiple hits, but no response to

Turnitin requests

Possible problems:Staff Turnover

University no longer registered with Turnitin


Current Use

Turnitin is now allowing contract cheating detectives to attribute work that has not been identified using other methods29% success rate based on sample in paper

Recommendation – academics should load all assignment specifications into Turnitin


Resources

Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_cheating

Contract Cheating Special Interest Group (supported by the Higher Education Academy):https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CONTRACTCHEATING

Materials from recent HEA STEM Contract Cheating Workshop:http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/13_March_Computing_Contract_Birmingham

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_cheating

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CONTRACTCHEATING

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=CONTRACTCHEATING

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/13_March_Computing_Contract_Birmingham




For More Information

Thomas LancasterEmail: [email protected]: http://thomaslancaster.co.ukTwitter: @DrLancaster

Robert ClarkeEmail: [email protected]

Slides Available Athttp://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster

mailto:[email protected]

http://thomaslancaster.co.uk/

https://twitter.com/DrLancaster

https://twitter.com/DrLancaster

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.slideshare.net/ThomasLancaster

@MyBCU #contractcheating 1 Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating Thomas Lancaster.

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