Luigi M Bianchi
[from Edupage, 8 December1998]
WEB SITE PINPOINTS PLAGIARISM
As students' use of the World Wide Web has increased, reports of
plagiarized term papers have proliferated. Now there's a new Web
site designed to ferret out cut-and-paste papers, and the
developers are pitching their product to professors and academic
deans in the hope they'll be willing to pay for such a service.
Dubbed IntegriGuard, the site checks the text of a submitted paper
against the text of all the papers in its database, and gives it a
"pass" or "fail" grade. The database includes about 600 papers so
far, most of them purchased from term-paper mills. All papers
submitted for inspection will also be added to the database. The
developers hope that eventually professors will routinely use their
site for all submissions: "The concept of the whole site is the
deterrent that it creates," says co-developer Warren Brantner.
(Chronicle of Higher Education 11 Dec 98)
_____________________________________________________________
Luigi M Bianchi
Science and Technology Studies phone: +1-416-736-5213
Atkinson College, York University fax: +1-416-736-5766
4700 Keele St, Toronto, Ontario e-mail: lbianchi@yorku.ca
Canada M3J-1P3 http://www.yorku.ca/sts/