UW Ellbogen CTL: Instructional Computing Services
Last update 27 January, 2003; R. Hill
(Adapted from 20 September 2002 workshop notes)
Instructors who assign writing projects occasionally find themselves uncomfortably suspicious of the originality of student work, and, having heard that the Internet is a rich source of plagiarized material, wonder how to search for a possible source of that work. Many Internet sites do indeed provide self-published commentary and fiction, many provide documents as a public service by government agencies, and some have been set up to sell papers and essays outright (www.duenow.com). Among the many services that compare text submissions to Internet documents are Turnitin and EVE2. Finding Turnitin inadequate, UW has selected EVE2.
The staff of the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning does not, in general, recommend the use of software to detect plagiarism, but rather recommends that students be given developmental assignments, turning in progress reports, prospectuses, drafts, and bibliographies, both to discourage plagiarism and to encourage good research and revision habits. Like any mechanical text search, EVE2 is a simple tool only, with limitations demonstrated by the test results in the Appendix below, and should play a minor part in assessment. The writing model presented by Turnitin, in which a student presumably submits several refinements of a paper until it "passes" the plagiarism test, leaves us especially dubious. The Council of Writing Program Administrators explains this issue in a position statement (http://www.ilstu.edu/~ddhesse/wpa/positions/index.html) that makes sense to us.
You must first obtain the UW account name and registration password from this office or from the Office of Academic Affairs. Then download EVE2 from http://www.canexus.com/eve/download.shtml and run the self-executing install file.
Set up the papers for which you wish to search as files in plain text or MS Word or Wordperfect, in your local folders, then choose them in EVE2's submission window. EVE2 runs in a few minutes for simple searches. The tests described below, submitted all at once, took about an hour. Results are returned in the EVE2 window and also logged in your local submission folder as RTF files.
EVE2 succeeded in most cases, finding obvious Internet documents along with original Postscript sources, amateur pages on commercial servers, and the problematic overseas university page. We advise, however, that the instructor never use its results alone as a basis for judgment regarding any given essay. As the last test shows, mechanical matching driven by parameters can yield false negatives, and false positives can be generated by earlier versions of the test document, or by lengthy quotation.
"The disadvantages of this development are increasingly being recognised by politicians, particularly within the European Union. In recent European documents, such as the Fifth Action Programme, it is argued that the traditional development of the countryside should be stopped and that a sustainable development of society should result in limitations to the 'normal' economic development of regions."
Results:
Google (Advanced, exact phrase): "404 Not Found"
Alta Vista (Advanced, exact phrase): "Found 0 results"
MSN Search for exact string cut off at "... European doc," then failed.
Excite: No exact phrase search.
Dogpile: No exact phrase search.
"In recent European documents, such as the Fifth Action Programme, it is argued that the traditional development of the countryside should be stopped and that a sustainable development of society should result in limitations to the 'normal' economic development of regions."
Results:
Google (Advanced, exact phrase): Successful; found van der Straaten paper.
Google was able to find this source because it translates PDF documents
into HTML as it inspects them.
Alta Vista (Advanced, exact phrase): "Found 0 results"
Results: Google immediately found the original Richard Hay piece.