Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Plagiarism detection software is only partially useful, according to this report, and professors may be better off just using Google to detect infractions. In addition to false positives (revealing the ironic situation where professors who never read the papers are nonetheless giving grades on them) the system fails to detect as many as a third of the instances discovered by Google. "We say that we're using this software in order to teach students about academic dishonesty, but we're using software we know doesn't work," Schorn said. "In effect, we're trying to teach them about academic dishonesty by lying to them." From Academica, here are the links to the 2007 Study and the 2015 Study.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 6:54 p.m.

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