CSC 379 SUM2008:Week 2, Group 1

Turn-it-in and MOSS

Protecting against plagiarism in academic work is important and many tools are available for instructors to use to verify students are not incorporating known works into their own without attribution. Turn-it-in for essays, and MOSS for software are two. Both require sending a copy of a student’s work to a central repository for it to be checked against the other works that the repository contains. The results are reported to the instructor and the student’s work is retained in the repository, adding to the body of work that future works will be checked against.

Examine the ethical considerations surrounding use of programs like Turn-it-in and MOSS.

• http://turnitin.com/static/plagiarism.html
• http://chronicle.com/free/2008/03/2250n.htm
• http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/
• http://www.cse.nd.edu/~kwb/nsf-ufe/1110.pdf

MOSS

MOSS (Measure Of Software Similarity) is a system for determining the similarity of different programs. To date, the main application of MOSS has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes. Since its development in 1994, Moss has been very effective in this role. The algorithm behind moss is a significant improvement over other cheating detection algorithms. The system was developed by (and resides at) Stanford. The algorithm is hidden to end users, meaning users must send the batch of code to Standford's server and wait for a response.

Supported Languages: C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Visual Basic, Javascript, FORTRAN, ML, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, Pascal, Modula2, Ada, Perl, TCL, Matlab, VHDL, Verilog, Spice, MIPS assembly, a8086 assembly, a8086 assembly, MIPS assembly, HCL2

For more information on MOSS, visit Stanford's site at the following link: [1]

TurnItIn

TurnItIn got its start in 1996 when a group of researchers at UC Berkeley created a series of computer programs to monitor the recycling of research papers in their large undergraduate classes. The researchers teamed with a group of teachers, mathematicians, and computer scientists to form Plagiarism.org, the world's first internet-based plagiarism detection service.

By late 1998, Plagiarism.org had become the center of international media attention. The small organization was featured in several major media venues, including Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and the New York Times. In the six years since, Plagiarism.org has continued to grow and is now recognized around the world as TurnItIn and iThenticate, the internet's most widely used and trusted resources for preventing the spread of internet plagiarism.

TurnItIn's homepage can be found at the following link: [2]

Plagiarism overview

According to Plagiarism.org, plagiarism is "to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own, to use (another's production) without crediting the source, to commit literary theft, or to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source." Plagiarism has always been a large problem in universities. The start of the internet made plagiarism even easier due to the large amount of material available. Many schools have very strict punishments for plagiarism. In North Carolina, plagiarism is a class 2 misdemeanor. [3]

Plagiarism is unethical because it is an act of stealing. Plagiarism steals another writers words and takes the credit of their original thoughts away from them and giving credit to the author who took the work. Schools try very hard to teach prevention of plagiarism, but that's not always enough. That's why there are programs like TurnItIn and MOSS.

Ethical considerations

The act of plagiarism itself is one that is fraught with obvious ethical and moral implications but what about the software that is used to check for plagiarism? Could they too have ethical concerns that are not so obvious? In a word, Yes.

One of the main ethical concerns with MOSS and Turn-It-In is in regard to how they operate. In order to effectively check for plagiarism, they need a massive database of work to use as a basis for comparison. The only way this can be achieved is by collecting information from students and other sources on a massive scale and then in turn, using that same information to compare against future work. Whether a student likes it or not they are effectively giving a copy of their work to these companies for them to use in the advancement and betterment of their product. A product that, at least in the case of Turn-It-In, is marketed commercially and the company does in fact make money off of its use and thus are making money off of the uncredited work of students. These students are often not asked for permission to use their work, they are not paid for their contributions, and ultimately they are not even credited for their work in helping to combat plagiarism. The ethics of this practice are controversial enough that they were the subject of an unsuccessful class-action lawsuit in 2007.[4] The point of the lawsuit was that public high-school students, too young to enter into a legally binding contract, were being forced to send their work to a company that would in turn use that work to increase their own profits. [5]

Another significant ethical and moral problem with these programs is that by using them, students are being treated as if they are guilty until proven innocent and that all students are inherently cheaters. [6] This ethical dilemma is one that instructors must contend with whenever they employ such technology but the alternative, that of manually researching content, is far to time intensive in many cases to be considered a viable alternative. As a result, the use of anti-plagiarism software is not uncommon in high schools and colleges.

Links & Sources

• 1 Official Moss Homepage
• 2 Official TurnItIn Homepage
• 3 Plagiarism.org
• 4 Plagiarism Today
• 5 Washington Post
• 6 Blogspot