CITS Academic Integrity Project Underway

With ubiquitous student access to the Internet, plagiarism has never been easier. To help the university maintain academic integrity, a CITS research team is developing an improved open-source system to counter student plagiarism. This system will offer an alternative to commercial software, such as Turnitin.com, while avoiding the legal and computing difficulties they face. It is expected that such software will provide both a deterrent value as well as a policing function in the classroom. Professor Kevin Almeroth, Associate Director of CITS, and doctoral student Allan Knight of the Computer Science department are working to develop software that will allow professors to quickly identify both 'peer-to-peer' plagiarism and instances of students plagiarizing from Internet sources. At the same time, CITS Director Bruce Bimber and doctoral student Joe Gardner are evaluating the implementation of an early version of this software, which has been used nine times. This early version included only the peer-to-peer function and while final results are not yet in, it proved able to identify a variety of instances of cheating by students.