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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Some of the work should have been spotted by plagiarism checkers

I've been in postgraduate academia and industry, and been involved in multiple conferences at different levels. I'm not aware of anyone ever running a plagiarism detector on any submitted work at all. Do other people do this? Should the people I work with have been doing it?

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My daughter is in 5th grade, attending school virtually due to the pandemic, and she has all her submitted assignments automatically verified by plagiarism checkers. In fact, she's encouraged to use online plagiarism checkers herself before submission to avoid false positives.

My partner finds it frustrating that she has to edit out “false positives” even when she knows damn well she hasn’t plagiarised.

Editors have to do that already, so if she doesn't have an editor, it probably is her job.

In High School, I did a (very) short co-op copyrighting for a radio station. At the time I thought it was pretty ridiculous that I had to basically reword everything to mean the same thing, but differently. As a grown-up and seeing the same stories in different papers struck me as ultra-lazy, and then I realized why all that copyrighting had to be done.

“Copywriting”, just fyi in case it’s one of those “word I hear but rarely see written” things and not autocorrect.

Thanks.

There is some deeper irony in misspelling that particular word. Indeed the job title was copywriting. But the reason for the position in the first place was to avoid plagiarism and copyright issues.

According to a cursory search, I probably just invoked the wrath of a lot of righters and writers alike. I'm very picky when it comes to grammar and spelling, so I deserve what comes.

How obnoxious. I would hate that too, and would be tempted to refuse. Is that a common thing to do these days? With the seriousness of academic dishonesty charges, I don't see why students would put up with this.

If someone wants to bring meritless flimsy accusations, I wouldn't want to help them do their homework in running down all the accidental matches found by their commercial provider, let alone rewrite my work in the process.

They aren't accusations just match scores. The scores are pretty meaningless unless there's a really good match. Obviously one shouldn't use that alone to determine guilt. Charges are decided by professors and committees, not turnitin. Yes some students might be concerned about the partial matches to the point of anxiety, but the solution is to simply assuage those fears. Because unfortunately, too many others habitually cheat with a misguided confidence that they can get away with it. Not to mention a completely warped sense of the risk versus reward for what they are doing. Making them go through turnitin is a way to dissuade doing that. Letting them see the scores before they submit the assignment is also a nicer way to push back. As opposed to having to hand out F's to get the point across.

> the solution is to simply assuage those fears

The parent commenter's experience suggests that teachers are not doing that; instead, they're encouraging people to rewrite non-plagiarised work so that it doesn't trigger partial matches.

That is my experience too: teachers don't want the hassle of figuring out what a false positive really means.

It's been a minute since I was in 5th grade. I'm trying to remember what kind of assignments I would have had where I could have plagiarized something that would not have been immediately obvious to the teacher.

My mother was a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher in California fifty years ago. She would sometimes have her students write stories, and once one girl turned in a delightful little story that stood out from the others. My mother thought she showed real talent and praised her to the skies, showed the story to other teachers, brought it home and showed it to our family, etc. A year or two later, my mother happened across exactly the same story in a children’s book in the library. It was clear that the girl had just copied her story out of the book. My mother was really sad about the whole thing for quite a while.

Of course it would have been unheard of when I was in 5th grade because our assignments weren't even computer readable. In my day, we were expected to copy articles from the World Book Encyclopedia, and they were graded on neatness.

But my kids both recently graduated from high school. There is a tendency for teachers of each grade to prepare kids for subsequent grades. I can imagine hearing: "They will have to do this in sixth grade, so we're preparing them now" without questioning why it's done in any grade. This makes the curriculum seem more "advanced."

I actually don't think my kids had to use turnitin. At least, I never heard about it. A bigger concern is writing stuff that might be reviewed by employers, law enforcement, and so forth, or subjected to some kind of automated analysis in the future. They've heard about the social credit score. They're all familiar with the lesson: "Don't write anything that you would not want to see on the front page of the newspaper."

I'm lucky that anything I ever wrote in school is now in the bit bucket.

Only thing I could think of is passing off big brother’s book report as my own. Would a plagiarism detector to work in that situation? Does every report and essay a child writes get added to the database for future works to be checked against?

I had an run-in with a plagiarism checker in undergrad (USA, 2008). A professor ran a research paper I had submitted through a plagiarism checker and it came back a 100% match. (I had researched and written the paper myself.) It led to a very awkward meeting which started with him saying "I think we both know why you're here" and me having no idea why I was there.

Luckily it ended with him resubmitting the paper to the checker and it coming back clean. (I got an A.)

> It led to a very awkward meeting which started with him saying "I think we both know why you're here" and me having no idea why I was there.

I had this happen once, except it was because someone else in one of his other classes had the same name as me.

What was the cause of the false positive?

I can only theorize. Perhaps due to some error, the web upload submitted a 0 byte file which perfectly matched another 0 byte file.

The professor submitted one of his own papers by mistake?

Here in Germany, at least thesis works will usually be required as PDF and ran through a checker (which will then, in turn, register the work). It doesn't seem to be overly important (it seems, for example, everyone copies that required front page ;) ), but they did catch a missing source in the thesis of a friend of mine, so they do look at it.

It is pretty normal for most universities to require all assignments be submitted via TurnItIn or a similar tool that can do aggregated plagiarism checks not just against published articles but also assignments submitted by other students.

But it doesn't apply to conference papers as far as I know or journal articles either. (As in when submitting to a journal for publication).

I keep waiting for someone to find a plagiarism checker retained a copy of their work and sue for copyright infringement.

Of course they retain a copy; that's part of how they detect plagiarism. It's been ruled fair use in the US [1], and if it hadn't it would be in the terms and conditions. You can opt out of retention on TurnItIn, but it's the default.

[1] https://www.turnitin.com/blog/top-15-misconceptions-about-tu...

Does it satisfy FERPA? If my paper were in their database, and all or part of it was revealed to another student in the process of claiming a match, that would be a violation of my FERPA rights.

Only if it was personally identifiable.

I think that ruling is only for the Fourth Circuit.

I know it's common for undergrad work in the UK. I don't know about post-grad.

It is. At least where I worked (well-known British university).

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