5.0787 Rs: Plagiarism (3/89)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 26 Mar 1992 15:07:03 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0787. Thursday, 26 Mar 1992.
(1) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 14:16:09 -0500 (18 lines)
From: jdg@oz.plymouth.edu (Dr. Joel Goldfield)
Subject: Plagiarism info again
(2) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 1:24:10 EST (60 lines)
From: lenoblem@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Lenoble Michel)
Subject: Re: 5.0782 Plagiarism
(3) Date: Mon, 23 Mar 92 23:45:04 EST (11 lines)
From: Bernard.van't.Hul@um.cc.umich.edu
Subject: 5.0782 Qs: Plagiarism
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 14:16:09 -0500
From: jdg@oz.plymouth.edu (Dr. Joel Goldfield)
Subject: Plagiarism info again
Regarding John Dorenkamp's query of 23 March 1992, there is probably
a substantial file in HUMANIST's archives of last Fall or so regarding
plagiarism information which several colleagues & I provided. You
can reach Glatt Plagiarism Services at P.O. Box 162033, Sacramentio,
CA 95816. Tel. 916-483-8773. They exhibited at the 1990 MLA convention.
Regards,
Joel D. Goldfield
Dept. of Foreign Languages
Plymouth State College/Univ. System of NH;
Inst. for Academic Technology/UNC-Chapel Hill;
Assistant Editor, _Computers and the Humanities_
jdg@oz.plymouth.edu
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------81----
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 1:24:10 EST
From: lenoblem@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Lenoble Michel)
Subject: Re: 5.0782 Qs: Quotes; Dictionary; Yearbook; Plagiarism (5/72)
> The current issue of *Lingua Franca* has a brief notice of
> Glatt Plagiarism Services, a new software product that
> "promises to spot 98 percent of term-paper plagiarism."
>
> There are two programs, the Glatt Pelgiarism Teaching
> Program and the Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program. Each
> are listed as selling for $250.
Over a year ago, I had the opportunity to test the Glatt
plagiarism package to write about it. As I didn't want to write
devastatingly negative comments about it, I refrained from ever
publishing anything about it.
Glatt Plagiarism Detector (GPD) was a two-part soft which
worked as follows: you had to feed the first processor with the
e-copy of the suspected paper so that it would generate a copy
of it with every five word missing or rather replaced by a white
spaces between brackets.
You then had to hand over that partially erased version of
the paper to its author for him to try and fill in the missing
blanks.
The assumption underneath this soft was that if someone
copies a text from another source, he or she is less inclined to
be able to rewrite the text with the same wording as he or she
used in the first version of it than if he or she has in fact
written the paper him/herself. He or she may even be totally
enable to fill some of the blanks space at all.
The second part of GPD is the one you never had a chance to
see or test since you had to send the floppy with the original
paper and the filled in version of it to Glatt Plagiarism
Services. They would then eventually tell you that, after careful
evaluation, they had (or had not) very good reasons to believe
that the paper in question was a case of plagiarism. The
criteria they used to so decide was the (if I remember
correctly) 70% mark, meaning that the student had filled at
least seventy percents of the blank spaces correctly. They also
claimed there was some ponderation taking place in cases of
synonym use.
To me, two major flaws had to be mentioned concerning the GPD
package. First, you each time had to pay for each paper you did
send to GP Services and secondly, it didn't yield sufficient
evidence - except a statistical one - to convict a paper's
author of plagiarism or to win an eventual court case against
him or her. A decisive piece of evidence would, to me, consist
in finding the references of the plagiarized work or works from
which the paper's author has borrowed some passages.
I deliberately used past tenses in the previous paragraph since
it may well be that GPS - judging by their present pricing - may
have decided since last year to sell the second evaluation
processor along with the first preparation one. This woud make
my first criticism irrelevant. But, the second, most important
one to me, still remains valid.
Michel.
--
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------------
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Michel Lenoble |
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Date: Mon, 23 Mar 92 23:45:04 EST
From: Bernard.van't.Hul@um.cc.umich.edu
Subject: 5.0782 Qs: Quotes; Dictionary; Yearbook; Plagiarism (5/72)
Before buying any program "that promises to spot 98 percent of
term-paper plagiarism" [John Dorenkamp, 5.0782], I would need a
clearer understanding than I have of why a very good dictionary
wouldn't enable one "to spot 100 percent" of ALL so-called
plagiarism, the "term-paper" type included. That is to ask:
What (in program-discernible detail) IS plagiarism?