Rio Salado College‘s peer-to-peer plagiarism detector has been awarded the 2010 WCET Outstanding Work (WOW) Award.
A pioneer in distance learning, the college’s faculty were early adopters of anti-plagiarism technologies, such as Turnitin, says Vernon Smith, vice president of academic affairs. But instructors needed a tool to compare student submissions with work submitted in other sections or previous semesters. To save money, Rio Salado developed its own system in house.
The plagiarism detector is fast, accurate and robust, Smith says. It’s not fooled when students modify paragraph orders or replace words with synonyms. Matches are reported to faculty chairs via e-mail within 12 hours.
“Plagiarism Alert!” emails indicate how similar the two submissions are (i.e. 85% similar). They also contain all relevant student and course information, along with the full text submissions from both students. The submissions are presented together with exact matches highlighted to help facilitate accurate analysis. Although the system detects both semantic and exact matches, only the exact matches are highlighted within the emails for simplicity.
The faculty chair investigates the case and decides on a sanction, which can range from requiring the student to take a remediation module on academic integrity, a “0” on the assignment, an F for the class or expulsion.
