N.Y. Times. Jan 20, 2000

Brilliant or Plagiarized? Colleges Use Sites to Expose Cheaters

    -Also see:  Lessons in Internet Plagiarism, June 28, 2001.

        By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

        DR. DAVID PRESTI, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California at Berkeley, had
        always assumed that some of his students turned in term papers copied from the Internet. After all, there
        are dozens of Web sites where students who have no qualms about plagiarism can download
        ready-made term papers about topics like ''Hamlet'' and the Russian Revolution to use as their own.

        Until recently, however, Dr. Presti had never caught a cheater because it would have required spending
        countless hours searching the Internet for evidence. But now, using Plagiarism.org, he can identify
        students who choose deceit over research.

        Through Plagiarism.org, Dr. Presti found that 45 of 320 students from the last spring semester had
        plagiarized at least part of their essays from the Internet. ''It's so easy to cheat now,'' Dr. Presti said.
        ''But this increasing digitalization is also making it easier to find cheaters out.''

        A handful of companies, like Plagiarism .org, are offering Internet-based antiplagiarism technology that
        teachers can use for a fee. The most complex sites compare student term papers with millions of Web
        pages and the archives of dozens of online sites that offer term papers free. While the anti-plagiarism
        sites do not have access to the databases of operations that sell term papers, they would be able to spot
        many commercial term papers because they can check databases that professors are starting to use to
        keep copies of term papers from past semesters.

        If the service finds similarities, it notifies the teacher, who must then decide whether the similarities are
        coincidences, justified by proper footnotes or outright dishonesty.

        Companies that sell anti-plagiarism services say dozens of schools are testing such services. Fees start
        at about $20 a year for a class of 30, with cheaper per-student or per-class rates for larger contracts.
        The fees are paid by universities or teachers.

        Some students criticize the technology, saying it undermines honor codes based on trust between
        students and faculty.

        Plagiarism.org was developed by John Barrie, a graduate student in biophysics at the University of
        California at Berkeley. He said he had developed the site to ''level the playing field for honest students.''

        Papers sent to Plagiarism.org are checked by a computer, which looks for phrases matching those from
        other sources or are partly altered (www.plagiarism .org). The computer compares the term papers with
        the archives of free online cheating sites. The computer also does Web searches to look for similarities.
        It also compares essays with papers from previous semesters and other universities.

        Within 24 hours, the company sends a report of its findings to the teacher by e-mail. Teachers are
        cautioned by the companies not to use that information as absolute proof of plagiarism. The reports
        merely point out phrases that should be examined more closely. Teachers must check for themselves
        whether flagged sentences are attributed.

        Some cheaters may try to evade detection by stealing only a few paragraphs, changing words or
        inserting the plagiarized material into the middle of a term paper. But Matt Hunter, founder of the Essay
        Verification Engine, or EVE (www.canexus.com), an antiplagiarism service based in Sackville, New
        Brunswick, said that software like his usually uncovered even subtle dishonesty.

        ''My software takes an essay, fragments it, and if a student has changed the words, it still finds the
        pieces,'' said Mr. Hunter, who is a college student.

        This is not the first time that technology has been used to uncover cheating. A system that has been in use
        for years, the Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, lets a teacher find out if a student is truly the author
        of a paper by posing a test: parts of the paper are deleted at random by the program, and the student is
        asked to replace the deleted material (www.plagiarism .com). If the student cannot do that, plagiarism is
        suspected.

        Another program, called MOSS (www.cs.berkeley.edu/aiken/moss.html), which has been around since
        1994 and is in widespread use, serves computer science classes. It automatically searches lines of
        computer code for similarities.

        Currently, many schools do little to stop plagiarism, said Jeanne M. Wilson, president of the Center for
        Academic Integrity, whose member institutions include Duke University, the University of California at
        Los Angeles, the University of Maryland at College Park and Rutgers University. Ms. Wilson is also
        director of student judicial affairs for the University of California at Davis. Ms. Wilson said that some
        students had threatened lawsuits over the issue of plagiarism charges but that she knew of no lawsuits
        that had been filed.

        ''If you look at academic integrity problems at many campuses,'' Ms. Wilson said, ''there aren't that many
        cases being examined, even though we think there is a good amount of cheating going on.''

        Anti-cheating technology is not embraced by everyone. At Stanford University, the student newspaper
        recently said that Plagiarism.org, which administrators are considering using, would violate the school's
        policy against using ''unusual and unreasonable precautions'' against cheating.

        ''The honor code is one of the most important tenets of the university,'' said Gil Lopez, the newspaper's
        editor in chief, in an interview. ''Using technology to catch people contradicts the spirit of the
        university.'' Mr. Lopez said he also worried about the reliability of antiplagiarism technology.

        The antiplagiarism companies agree that technology has limits. Warren Brantner, president of
        IntegriGuard, an anti-cheating service in Harrisburg, Pa., said that it was best to use antiplagiarism Web
        sites with other measures, like assigning more unusual topics (www.integriguard.com).

        Dr. Presti, the neurobiology professor at Berkeley, said that nearly 15 percent of his students had
        plagiarized even after he warned them about computerized scrutiny.

        ''They ranged from sloppy citations to, in one case, the entire paper was taken from several Web sites,''
        Dr. Presti said.

        ''I went back and talked to the most serious violators, and they immediately admitted to it,'' Dr. Presti
        said. ''When you show the color coding and where it came from, there's no denying it.''
 

An example from Rutgers Camden.  A student submitted this assignment:

2.  Write a paragraph explaining Why Determinism Cannot Model Complex Systems,  based on ideas from
What is Chaos.   Type your paragraph here:

             Chaos is qualitative in that it seeks to know the general
        character of a systems long-term behavior, rather than
        seeking numerical predictions about a future state. What
        characteristics will all solutions of a system exhibit? How
        does this system change from exhibiting one behavior to
        another?

        Chaotic systems are unstable since they tend not to resist
        any outside disturbances but instead react in significant
        ways. In other words, they do not shrug off external
        influences but are partly navigated by them.
        The variables describing the state of a system do not
        demonstrate a regular repetition of values and are therefore
        aperiodic. This unstable aperiodic behavior is highly
        complex since it never repeats and continues to show the
        effects of the disturbance(s).

        These systems are deterministic because they are made up
        of few, simple differential equations, and make no
        references to implicit chance mechanisms. This is not to be
        completely equated with the metaphysical or philosophical
        idea of determinism (that human choices could be
        predetermined as well).

        Finally, a dynamic system is a simplified model for the
        time-varying behavior of an actual system. These systems
        are described using differential equations specifying the
        rates of change for each variable.

3.   Define the following

I typed  "chaos is qualitative in that it seeks" into Google, getting the following:
 

    The following words are very common and were not included in your search: is in that it. [details]
 

 Searched the web for "chaos is qualitative in that it seeks".
                                                                                           Results 1 - 5 of 5. Search took 0.40 seconds.
 

Chaos
... Chaos is qualitative in that it seeks to know the general character of a system's
long-term behavior, rather than seeking numerical predictions about a future ...
www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/lexicon/chaos.html - 4k - Cached - Similar pages

The link to the exploratorium had gone dead, but Google had the file in its cache:
 

 We borrow a working definition for chaos theory from Dr.
 Stephen Kellert: The Qualitative Study of Unstable Aperiodic Behavior
 in DeterministicNonlinear dynamical systems.11 I should briefly
 dissect some of these terms to better describe what is and what is
 not chaotic in nature:
 

        Chaos is qualitative in that it seeks to know the general
        character of a system's long-term behavior, rather than
        seeking numerical predictions about a future state. What
        characteristics will all solutions of a system exhibit? How
        does this system change from exhibiting one behavior to
        another?
        Chaotic systems are unstable since they tend not to resist
        any outside disturbances but instead react in significant
        ways. In other words, they do not shrug off external
        influences but are partly navigated by them.
        The variables describing the state of a system do not
        demonstrate a regular repetition of values and are therefore
        aperiodic. This unstable aperiodic behavior is highly
        complex since it never repeats and continues to show the
        effects of the disturbance(s).
        These systems are deterministic because they are made up
        of few, simple differential equations, and make no
        references to implicit chance mechanisms. This is not to be
        completely equated with the metaphysical or philosophical
        idea of determinism (that human choices could be
        predetermined as well).
        Finally, a dynamic system is a simplified model for the
        time-varying behavior of an actual system. These systems
        are described using differential equations specifying the
        rates of change for each variable.

-------------------------------------------

New York Times Story, September 3, 2001:

          MEDIA TALK
An Accusation of Online Plagiarism

          By FELICITY BARRINGER

             Ken Layne, a columnist with The
             Online Journalism Review, at the
          University of Southern California's
          Annenberg School for Communication,
          went to the Web last week to shame a
          Business Week Online reporter who,
          he believed, had stolen his work
          without credit.

          As plagiarism accusations go, Mr. Layne's article, "Want My Story? Help
          Yourself!" had more heft than some. Comparing his Aug. 14 article about an
          Australian Web site and an Aug. 28 Business Week Online article that mentioned
          the site, he found suspicious similarities.

          Both pieces used identical language in reporting that the founder of the Web site,
          Crikey.com.au, was awarded a prize for 16 articles detailing "his adventures as a
          loudmouth shareholder in 50 of the country's biggest companies." Each article
          compared Crikey.com's costs to those of salon.com, saying that salon loses $30,000
          a day.

          But nowhere in Ms. Black's article was there a sentence exactly identical to any of
          Mr. Layne's. Ms. Black was out of the country late last week and did not return a
          call and an e- mail message seeking comment. Bob Arnold, the editor of Business
          Week Online said Mr. Layne "is exaggerating." He added, "There are a couple of
          parallels that I wish weren't there. But it doesn't amount to plagiarism."

          In his formal response, posted at www.ojr.org, Mr.
          Arnold wrote, "publishing independently verified
          facts that previously appeared elsewhere isn't
          plagiarism."

          Since the dispute, Business Week Online has credited
          Mr. Layne's work.

                Want My Story? Help Yourself!  On the Internet no one can hear you steal
                By Ken Layne, OJR Columnist