Tue Aug 30 13:24:36 EDT 2005
Ah, an area near (but not dear) to my heart -- busting plagiarism.
Our university finally purchased turnitin.com subscription, which gets a
national database of term papers, many of them purchased from web sites or
handed in twice by fraternity or dorm buddies. It is expensive.
An excellent, cheaper alternative is EVE: www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml
With EVE, you have students turn in a second copy of their paper on floppy
or disk, then you upload all, or only suspect, papers to EVE. EVE then
searches the Internet for a certain percentage of material "poached" from
one or more sites. The final report shows you all the "cut and paste"
material in red with links to the web sites containing the original
material. EVE costs $20.
EVE does not burrow into proprietary term paper mills. However, in my
experience, most students simply use free material on the Internet. This is
a fast, effective way to check. Simply alerting them to the fact that you
use anti-plagiarism software (without naming all the programs) acts as a
deterrent as well.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Bean
Professor of History
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901-4519
618-453-7872
http://www.siu.edu/~histsiu/faculty/bean.html