@mybcu #contractcheating 1 using turnitin as a tool for attribution in cases of contract cheating...

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Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract

CheatingThomas Lancaster & Robert Clarke

Birmingham City UniversityHEA STEM Conference 2014

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Contract Cheating

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

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Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At

Birmingham City University

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Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At

Birmingham City University

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Turnitin

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

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Contract Cheating

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

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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

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Some Success

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

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Turnitin Example 1

Large match to assignment brief

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Turnitin Example 2

Multiple small hits from the same source

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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

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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

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Turnitin Example 5a

Freelancer request to re-write assignment

Source located by Turnitin

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Turnitin Example 5b

We try to follow up other postings.

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

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Turnitin Example 6

Multiple sources for

EdExcel courses

Example of “false positive”

matches

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Turnitin Example 7

Turnitin also matches public

web sites

Particularly useful if “old data” not found by Google

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Turnitin Example 8

Multiple hits, but no response to

Turnitin requests

Possible problems:Staff Turnover

University no longer registered with Turnitin

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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

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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

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For More Information

Thomas LancasterEmail: thomas.lancaster@bcu.ac.ukWebsite: http://thomaslancaster.co.ukTwitter: @DrLancaster

Robert ClarkeEmail: robert.clarke@bcu.ac.uk

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