Posted on Jan. 15: McMaster turns off cheating, by turning it in

It's as old as the hills, maybe even older than this clichi.

Plagiarism. Whether it's stealing ideas, facts or passages, academic dishonesty is not new to universities. But since the advent of the internet, cases of it have grown.

At McMaster, there were 173 cases in the 2001-02 academic year  90 more than the year before. Offences ranged from plagiarism from the internet to copying of assignments.

“Cheating is not new,” says Andrea Thyret-Kidd, McMaster's academic integrity officer. “However, with the Internet now in existence, so many students have taken the old way of cheating and are now using this new technology.”

McMaster is battling back with Turnitin.com, a computer software package designed to reveal plagiarism. Turnitin.com is used by a number of Canadian universities, including the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto and York University. “Cheating is a universal problem that universities are responding to,” Thyret-Kidd says.

With Turnitin.com, faculty members register onto its Web site and submit a course assignment. Students then submit their papers electronically and hand in a hard copy to their professor. The papers are compared to billions of pages of content located on the Internet and in its own databases. Within 24 hours, professors receive an “originality report” containing the results of those comparisons. Turnitin.com is used by more than 50 countries, and deters plagiarism for nearly five million students and educators worldwide, according to Turnitin.com.

Four McMaster faculty have volunteered to take part in the trial this term. The cost of the trial depends on the number of essays submitted. The university might look at obtaining an institutional membership in the fall depending on the success of the program this term, Thyret-Kidd says.

Recently approved by Senate, the proposal includes a statement that must be attached to course outlines. The statement defines plagiarism, its consequences and the possibility that a students' essay could be checked for cheating.

“Our hope and our goal is to be very public about this,” Thyret-Kidd says. “McMaster faculty have always checked for plagiarism, we're just handing them another tool to look for cheating.”