Birmingham City University holds a research conference, Rescon, in December of each year, providing short accessible shorts from staff and PhD students about their research.
My session built on work presented to the Higher Education academy looking at how text matching algorithms supplied by Turnitin could be used as part of the attribution of contract cheating. This is the challenging process where a request to have assessed work completed can be found online, but the academic institution to which the work is associated is hard to identify.
The slides, can be accessed on my SlideShare account, or viewed below.
The talk led to a wide-ranging discussion about wider aspects of contract cheating, plagiarism and academic misconduct. There was clearly a lot of local interest in the use of Turnitin and the associated training as well as the reasons that students cheat and how that could be avoided.
The group also had a discussion about translation plagiarism. Although I did undertake some initial research on this a few year’s ago, this is still a problem and needs to be the topic of continued research. Several academics believed that they had seen attempts to cheat by taking work and automatically translating it into different languages. The actual behaviour that I have previously observed and researched is more subtle and this may also be something that I discuss in more detail on this site in the future.