More thoughts on cheating, copyright and paraphrasing

by billso on Wednesday, 24 January 2007

I’ve been thinking about the Boing Boing article that I posted yesterday at http://billso.com/2007/01/23/ets-cheating/

I used to run an information technology certification exam program when I lived in Austin. We used VUE and Prometric to deliver our exams all over the world. The program still exists, even though it’s been through a few ownership and management changes. The latest incarniation is avialable at http://ciwcertified.com

I’ve got no problems with ETS’ terms of service. It’s their copyrighted exam, and ETS has worked with the testing centers to set the rules of engagement.

No one’s forcing this anonymous coward to take a GRE exam and go to grad school.

One reason our university subscribes to TurnItIn.com is that service helps protect our students’ intellectual property.

We do have problems with academic dishonesty, and sometimes it’s hard to determine if a student doesn’t know how to paraphrase or cite correctly. I’ve seen students change a word or two in a multi-sentence passage, without quotation marks or an in-text citation. TurnItIn.com almost always catches these unattributed quotations, and the originality report provides me with links to the original work.

Our students are enthusiatic Googlers, but it’s clear that some of them haven’t Googled “how to parapharase” and found good links like these:

This last link is a guide from our university library that is a good discussion, even if it was written in 1995.

I’ll update my APA and reference pages later this month to include some new links about these issues.