Websites which offer to write assignments for students are now banned under Australian law. The first example of such an essay mill, I have seen blocked was offering anything from a one page undergraduate paper to a complete PhD thesis, for about $20 a page. The site now displays in Australia 'The service is unavailable in Australia under the "Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Amendment" law.'. Curiously this does not give the full title of the legislation, leaving out "Prohibiting Academic Cheating". So I think this may be action by the website provider, to avoid prosecution, than by the relevant government agency.
It is easy enough to get around this for the desperate student. The website provider can they try to deny any wrongdoing. However, the student is likely to be disappointed when, despite assurances of the supplier, their deception is detected, and they are subject to academic disciplinary procedures. Students who are studying for entry into a profession need to keep in mind that there may be very severe legal consequences if they cheat and so are not competent to do their job.
I have been looking at which online tools could be used for students to create a logbook toShow-Your-Work. The Mahara Journal looked promising, especially as it is usually installed alongside Moodle. However, this would still be an additional tool students and staff would have to become familiar with. An alternative which looks promising is the Moodle Wiki. This can be set up so each student gets their own. I have created a logbook template which can be provided in the Wiki.
My template has a paragraph of explanatory text, then sections for the student to fill in. The student could create extra pages if they have a lot of content. But I expect one page will do for a typical student. They just click on "edit" the heading for a week, and put in some content.
The fill in the blanks sentences are adapted from James (p.43, 2005). The topics for each week are from the Australian National University's Techlauncher program (Awasthy, Flint, and Sankaranarayana, 2017). Questions for the Work Portfolio (Weeks 4 and 8) were suggested by Tempe Archer, ANU Careers. The idea here is to provide a prompt for the student each week to start writing and avoid presenting then with a confronting blank page. The students are asked to write about the activity set for that week and a specific aspect of it.
Jacques, Ouahabi and Lequeu (2020) refer to the use of logbooks in Google Drive for French first year first year engineering students learning online, but unfortunately give no more details. Kumar, Silva and Prelath, R. (2020) mention not having a project logbook as a problem for studio based learning in a Malaysian course, but again provide no more details.
Reference
Awasthy, R., Flint, S., & Sankaranarayana, R. (2017, April). Lifting the constraints—Closing the skills gap with authentic student projects. In 2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (pp. 955-960). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2017.7942964
James, Alisa, "Journaling as an Assessment Option" (2005). Kinesiology, Sport Studies and Physical Education Faculty Publications. 78. https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/pes_facpub/78
Jacques, S., Ouahabi, A., & Lequeu, T. (2020). Remote Knowledge Acquisition and Assessment During the COVID-19 Pandemic. International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy (iJEP), 10. URL https://www.thierry-lequeu.fr/data/JACQUES-04.pdf
Kumar, J. A., Silva, P. A., & Prelath, R. (2020). Implementing studio-based learning for design education: a study on the perception and challenges of Malaysian undergraduates. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 1-21. URL https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10798-020-09566-1.pdf
Chicago
Logbook
You can use this logbook to keep notes, plans, and drafts of your work. This logbook is not assessed and is not visible to other students. However, it can be used as supporting evidence that the work you submitted for assessment was your own. All entries are logged and timestamped by the system, so the examiner will be able to see when you made notes and prepared drafts of your work.
Logbook
Your Name:
Student ID:
Week 1: Team Formation
Date:
Entry: The project is to ___ . My role is to ___.
Week 2: Orientation
Date:
Entry: To successfully undertake my role I will need to learn to ___ . To do that I plan to ___.
Week 3: First Audit
Date:
Entry: The team managed to ___. To help with that I ___.
Week 4: First WPP Workshop
Date:
Entry: The key points from the WPP workshop were ___. The job I am considering is __ . So I will need to work on my ___ .
Week 5
Date:
Entry: One of the areas I need to work on with the teamwork is my ___ behavior. To address this I intend to ___ .
Week 6: Second Audit
Date:
Entry: The hardest part of the audit was ___ . This is because ___ .
Week 7
Date:
Entry: One of the skills I need to work on is ___ . To improve, outside the course I will ___ .
Week 8: Second Work Portfolio Workshop
Date:
Entry: Here is my unpacking of a job advertisement for the WPP workshop: ___
Week 9: Project Showcase Video
Date:
Entry: The main aspects to developing the video were to ___. My role was ___ . I found this ___.
Week 10: Third Audit
Date:
Entry: I was able to help the team with the audit by ___ . This could be useful in my career ___ .
Week 11
Date:
Entry: The team uses different forms of communication for different purposes. This includes ___ to ___ and ___ to ___. It could be improved by ___ .
I have been looking at how to use tools such as Microsoft Word in Office 365, Mahara Journals, or Git for students to have STEM students Show-Your-Work. There has been much written about the use of reflective e-portfolios for assessment. I have been trained to write, teach and assess reflectively. However this is something the average STEM student and teacher finds very difficult. So I propose a form of non-reflective, non-assessed student journal: the student is prompted to record what they did.
James (2005) sets out how to guide physical educations students through preparing an assessed journal. They are referring to paper journals, but the technique applies also to electronic ones. First the student should be encouraged to be prepared with a suitable journal personalized to their tastes. With an e-journal I suggest a preliminary exercise where the student ensures they have access to the e-journal system, and enter some information about themselves.
Ensuring students don't lose an e-journal is less of a problem than for the physical ones James discusses (p.42, 2005). An e-journal system used by an institution should obviously be protected from hacking and based up. However, it would nevertheless be useful to guide students through taking a copy of their journal, and reminding them not to edit old entries (as that then updates the time stamps ruining their value as evidence).
Writing prompts are more important for an e-journal used with an online course, than for the face to face classes James (2005) discusses. As the student will be mostly studying asynchronously, the teacher is not there and then saying "put a copy of that in your journal now". This has to be explicitly stated in course materials, ideally as part of a assessed task, so the student has an incentive. This can also be a good point. I suggest to mark a point in the course, an approach of synchronization of asynchronous learning (Worthington, 2013).
Writing prompt suggested by James (p.43, 2005) include:
"Write a paragraph about a ... goal you would like to reach. Explain why you want to reach that goal.
Write a paragraph about what you did today that helped you to be successful in today's activities.
Write a paragraph about your ... behavior for the day. What things might you do to demonstrate more sporting behavior in the future?
What was the hardest thing for you to do today? Why was it hard?
Write a paragraph that includes the cues of striking that we learned today. What will you do outside of school to practice these cues?
Write a paragraph that includes the main aspects one should consider when developing a fitness program. Hint: Remember the FIT principle
Write a paragraph that describes activities that you can do in your community that promote cardiovascular endurance .
Write a paragraph that explains the difference between verbal and nonverbal communication. Why is it important to use both in cooperative activities? Be sure to give specific examples of both verbal and nonverbal communication." From James p.43, 2005, numbering added.
These are ordered from more to less reflective. The first four are about the individual student goals, success, behavior, difficulties. The next three are about future plans of the student to learn skills. The last is a more traditional study question about the course material.
These questions are not that different to ones which might be asked as study aids in any course. One of my frustrations as a student was that my answers to such questions were never looked at by anyone, let alone count towards assessment. In theory they help with learning, but in practice, like any student, I would tend to focus on what got looked at and especially marked. The e-journal gets around this problem by having answers go somewhere, perhaps be looked at and help me at least pass the course.
James (p.44, 2005) points out It is important assess journals, but not overdo it. entries. The author suggests the use of rubrics and checklists. However, they are unrealistic in expecting students to be frank in their entries. If the e-journal is part of the assessment, then students will write what they want the examiner to read.
For STEM students it can be especially difficult to find a comfortable voice to write about themselves. They may not understand the reason for writing this way and have had years of training which emphasized a neutral, impersonal way of writing. Also asking students to write for their e-journal is an extra task, as is assessing this. So I suggest a less personal approach, where the student places copies of what they are doing for their assigned tasks in their journal and comments on these. In this way the student is commenting on the task and their work, not themselves.
James, Alisa, "Journaling as an Assessment Option" (2005). Kinesiology, Sport Studies and Physical Education Faculty Publications. 78. https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/pes_facpub/78
Worthington, T. (2013). Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques. In Proceedings of 2013 8th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 26 Apr - 28 Apr 2013 , Sri Lanka. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCSE.2013.6553983 Preprint available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/9556
"It appears to me that students can "game" assignment deadlines by creating incomplete Journal entries before the assignment deadline, then editing them after the deadline, since the Journal entry time stamps don't update after editing..." From forum: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=6470&offset=0&limit=10
This was later fixed with each journal entry displayed showing both a "Posted on" and "Last updated" timestamp. I tried this out on Mahara and it seems to work. But is anyone using this? In practice, do students understand what to do and in particular not to make updates to journal entries (so it looks like they did all the work just before the deadline).
STEM professionals and in many other disciplines are expected to keep detailed records of their work. This is for intellectual property protection, accountability, and well as normal management of activities. Occasionally I am asked to be an expert witness for a court case when a computer project fails. I trawl through all these records to see what when wrong, and importantly, when. Some disciplines have specialized tools, such as Git for computing and Electronic lab notebooks, such as SciNote for medical research.
So it would be reasonable to require students to keep records, as part of projects and assignments. This should not require additional work for the students as they should be doing this as part of their normal work. If students are not doing this they are not doing their work professionally and so can expect a lower grade (all the way down to zero). This is apart from any penalty if it is shown the work submitted was not their own.
For students not using specialized tools, e-portfolios may be sufficient, such as Mahara Journals. It would still be possible for a student to contract cheat, by having someone else prepare the journal entries for them to post. However, this would require a level of forethought and planning. The student could also provide their password to the contractor to make the entries, but that would open the student and contractor to charges of criminal conspiracy, as well as misuse of a computer system. This would be in addition to legal penalties for the contract cheating.
Like many, it appears my students will be studying away from the face to face classroom again in 2021, at least for the first part of the year, due to COVID-19. So I have been considering how to improve online delivery, and in particular how to improve the experience of assessment for students while deterring misconduct. One way may be to require students to "Show Your Work" in assessments.
Some Literature
As Nguyen, Keuseman and Humston (2020) note online assessment was suddenly a major concern due to COVID-19. Some techniques they explored for chemistry students were short answers and multiple-choice tests to investigate higher-order thinking. They also looked at more frequent lower-stakes tests. This is possible as they are easier to administer online than face to face. The frequency, the authors suggest, may help with student learning and the lower stakes reduce the temptation to cheat. Interestingly the frequency is also claimed to reduce procrastination, as students are forced to study to pass the frequent small tests, rather than wait until a large test.
Nguyen, Keuseman and Humston (2020) also briefly looked at the use of an academic integrity pledge. However, they concluded this was only effective at an institution that has a culture of academic integrity. This seemed curiously circular reasoning: an institution that did not have a culture of academic integrity presumably would not have an integrity pledge.
To identify misconduct in online STEM courses, Sangalli, Martinez-Muñoz, and Cañabate (2020) analyzed the log from a learning management system of students undertaking exercises. They found co-occurrence of responses to exercises was an indicator of collusion, with pairs of students answering the same questions at the same time. Of course, this might give a false positive for students who are studying together.
Catalena (2020) was able to use the pattern of submission of student's coding assignments to identify plagiarism in a computer course. As students can submit repeatedly to a system that validates their code, it is possible to distinguish those who make incremental progress, from those who submit completed work. However, while submission of completed work without intermediate steps may indicate the student cheated by obtaining a correct answer from someone else it may be they used some other system for refining their answer, or they are exceptionally talented.
Pribela and Pracner (p. 99, 2017) propose building a system for students to create computer code, limiting the student's ability to copy from outside the system. This makes it possible to check the consistency of the student's work. It also prevents students from forgetting to include some element in their final assignment submission, as everything is in the system and accessible to the examiner. This seems a heavy-handed way to try to prevent misconduct and one which would stop students from using outside legitimate tools. The authors produced their temporal file system, based on Git, however, most of the benefit, I suggest, could be obtained by just using Git and allowing students import to it.
Dalziel (2008) suggests students prepare an ePortfolio, including the plans, notes, and comments to deter plagiarism. They point out that if entries are timestamped it is possible to see when entries are added. The author points out that the PebblePad ePortfolio tool has a link to the TurnItIn plagiarism detection tool. However, they don't report any results of using this approach.
Discussion
Students can be reluctant to start work on an assignment. Having a looming deadline, the student can be tempted to use old work of their own or someone else's, a form of poor academic practice or misconduct.
Students are urged to undertake their work methodically. However, they are only asked to submit the final product, not the steps taken to get there. This signals to the student that preparatory work is not of value. Students are therefore tempted to simply try to produce their final product, skipping steps in its production. Students may also become frustrated not understanding why they can't produce a polished result instantly, not realizing they are not the only ones who have to work through draft after draft.
An examiner competent in the discipline assisted by automated tools can look for signs of misconduct. However, this can be a time-consuming process which is stressful for staff as well as the accused student. Rather than look for poor practice, I suggest having students provide evidence of good practice.
A similar problem occurs with online examinations, where remote proctoring tools, such as ProctorU and Proctorio, have been employed. Those tools work reasonably well, but my colleagues at ANU Computer Science developed an alternative approach of self-invigilation for online examinations. Each student is encouraged to make recordings of themselves undertaking the exam, similar to those created by proctoring tools. The difference is the student makes the recording, rather than have software imposed on them. If the examiners raise concerns about who sat the exam, the student can present the video as evidence.
I suggest this self-invigilation process could be extended to assignments through a Show-Your-Work process, as Dalziel (2008) suggests. Rather than just submit their final completed assignment, the student would make available to the examiner all drafts, notes, and other work that was used in preparing the assignment. If there was doubt as to the author of the final work, the examiner could look to see if there was a consistent body of work by the student supporting it.
The student would be required to use a system that time stamped their work, and tracked any changes, not only of drafts of the final work but all notes used. It would then be possible to look for a consistent pattern of work over days or weeks.
This Show-Your-Work approach is already used in some group project-based courses in computer science at ANU. These require student teams to use project management software, such as GitLab. The examiner can see when work was uploaded to the system and who uploaded it, to see if this supports the team's claims.
Just as students can be videoed while undertaking an exam, a video record of all the time each student spent working on an assignment (or all the time they were studying) is technically feasible. However, this would be cumbersome to use, intrusive, and not necessary. An approach of logging all the work done on an assignment should be sufficient, as this is something the student should be doing anyway. Students in any field of study should be doing so in a methodical way, STEM, computer science, and engineering in particular.
While it would be possible for a student to fake the assignment preparation process, it would be cumbersome. The student would have to take the working notes of someone else (or commission these to be written) and submit these to the online system over several days or weeks. If the student tried to enter all the working notes just before the deadline, this will be evident from the timestamps.
The student could alternatively not only get the work from someone else, but have them submit it for them. This would require handing over their ID and password to upload the material. Using two-factor authentication might help deter this, where the student would be required to enter a code sent to the mobile phone. Also, the possibility of a jail term for conspiracy and computer crime may deter some students.
Asking students to show the notes and drafts of their assignment is much the same as telling students on an assignment question to "show their work". Where a student doesn't show how they derived the final result, the examiner can reduce the grade. This doesn't require accusing the student of plagiarism.
If students are asked to show their work, they will need to be guided as to what is a reasonable quantity of work over what period. During my MEd studies, I created a journal using the institution's Mahara e-portfolio system, in which I recorded my impressions of the program. Also, I created a journal for each course, and one for my capstone e-Portfolio (in place of a thesis). In these, I made notes on references found, answers to study questions, and appended drafts of assignments. This was mostly to aid me in my work, and to have material to draw on for my reflective e-portfolio. However, I also kept this as evidence, if I was ever to be charged with academic misconduct. Fortunately, that never occurred, and my journals remain read only by me. I made an average of 100 postings per course, a total of 100,000 words. This was in addition to the assignments and capstone e-portfolio.
Based on my experience as a student, a reasonable guide would be 50 words of supporting material per percent of assessment. So an assignment worth 20% of the course assessment undertaken over two weeks would require 1,000 words of supporting notes in 10 posts. This would be in addition to ten drafts of the assignments, over at least five days of the two weeks.
References
Catalena, K. A. (2020). Mining Student Submission Information to Refine Plagiarism Detection (Doctoral dissertation). https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/191583
Nguyen, J. G., Keuseman, K. J., & Humston, J. J. (2020). Minimize Online Cheating for Online Assessments During COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Chemical Education, 97(9), 3429-3435. URL https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00790
Dalziel, C. (2008). Using ePortfolios to combat plagiarism. Hello! Where are you in the landscape of educational technology? Proceedings ascilite Melbourne 2008. URL https://ascilite.org/conferences/melbourne08/procs/dalziel.pdf
Pribela, I., & Pracner, D. (2017, January). A Temporal File System for Student's Assignments in The System Svetovid. In SQAMIA. URL https://perun.pmf.uns.ac.rs/sqamia/2017/download/sqamia2017-proc.pdf#page=99
Sangalli, V. A., Martinez-Muñoz, G., & Cañabate, E. P. (2020, April). Identifying Cheating Users in Online Courses. In 2020 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (pp. 1168-1175). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON45650.2020.9125252
October 21 is the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating, according to the International Center for Academic Integrity. University of Technology Sydney appears to be the only Australian university member. Wouldn't it be better to have a day promoting the value of original work, and acknowledging the work of others? I found only three published papers mentioning this day. Is it a real thing, or something invented by checking companies?
Muller, L. S. (2019). A Keen Eye Avoids Plagiarism: A Cautionary Tale. Professional Case Management, 24(6), 323-326. https://journals.lww.com/professionalcasemanagementjournal/Citation/2019/11000/A_Keen_Eye_Avoids_Plagiarism__A_Cautionary_Tale.10.aspx
This week I had a curious email from an essay writing service proposing to pay me to promote their activities through this blog. From reading the email, and a casual read of their website it appears a legitimate business helping students. But on closer examination they offer to write whole assignments for students, admissions essays, and take multiple choice tests for them: "In need of a top-quality custom essay? Let our experts handle it! Our academic essay writers in Australia are waiting to help you with: Custom Essay ... Admission Essay... Multiple Choice Questions ...". Such cheating, plagiarism, and colluding, is dishonest and provides an unfair advantage. Unfortunately, while it is against the rules of educational institutions for students to make use of such services, it is not yet illegal in Australia for companies, or individuals, to offer or provide them. Perhaps a useful training exercise for cyber security students to find out as much as they can about those who provide these services, and a means of shutting them down.
"My name is ****, I work as a marketing assistant and outreach expert at ****.
I'm writing to ask if you would be interested in mutually beneficial business cooperation.
I would like you to consider two advertising options:
1) Sponsored
post contribution, meaning we write a unique SEO-friendly article which
corresponds to your blog theme and overall writing style;
2) Link insertion, meaning we pay for our link to be added in one of the existing articles related to our niche.
Let me your current rates for content publishing on tomw.net.au and content requirements (if any).
Looking forward to working with you,
****"
Rowland, Slade, Wong and Whiting (2018) looked at what attracts students to websites offering to write their assignments for them (so called contract cheating websites). The authors found that contract cheating websites had similar features to a typical website for a hotel. They found differences with the contract cheating websites emphasizing quality: qualifications of their authors, quality of the results, security, price, timeliness, confidentiality and satisfaction. Rather than a hotel, perhaps the authors should have used a dating website for comparison, where more trust is required by the client.
The way for institutions to counter the attraction of contract cheating, I suggest, is to use similar marketing on student support websites. Institutions might want to set up, or sponsor, semi-independent help sites, so students feel it is not more of the same from the institution.
It would also be useful for institutions to design courses using on-line distance education techniques. The idea is to provide students a course in small increments, with feedback and support. This way a student sees what they have to do and receive small rewards, in the form of grades, for doing it. Students who do not do the small exercises on-time and to the required standard can be quickly identified by instructors and offered help, before a major hurdle is reached. This way a student will not be left languishing at the back of the class for most of a semester, then be tempted to cheat to pass a major assessment exercise.
The student who does try to cheat on a major assignment will be easier to identify as this will not be consistent with their past work. Students will know that their instructor knows, from the feedback they get and so they will know they are likely to be caught cheating. I use this approach in the course "ICT Sustainability".
Reference
Rowland, S., Slade, C., Wong, K. S.,
& Whiting, B. (2018). ‘Just turn to us’: the persuasive features of
contract cheating websites. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(4), 652-665. URL https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1391948
Amigud et al. (2017) tested using machine-learning to identify what work is not by a student. The AI system is "trained" using work submitted by the students and then can spot work which does not match the writing style of an individual. They claim 93% accuracy, compared to human instructors being able to identify work not by the student only 12% of the time. This approach has the advantage that it can identify where work was contracted out to someone else, as well as where it was copied from a public source.
When faced with the suspicion that some students are cheating, it is tempting to ask for a supplementary face-to-face examination for that student. However, I suggest designing assessment so that all students are required to present a consistent body of work throughout their course.
Large assessment items can be replaced by multiple interlinked, scaffolded tasks. This will help students learn, while testing they have acquired required skills and knowledge. As a byproduct, this will make cheating much more difficult, as a student can't just contract out one major assignment as it will not be consistent with the student's other work.
As an example, in "ICT Sustainability", students have to answer weekly questions. The student then uses the answers in the two major assignments, which are each in two parts. This makes it difficult for a student to contract out one assignment, as the content has to be consistent with their prior work on the same topic.
There are also weekly automated quizzes on basic knowledge, drawn from a question bank (to make cheating harder). To be eligible to pass, the student must get at least 50% for the weekly work and 50% for the assignments, so they can't pass by doing well in just one assignment.
Also I use progressive assessment to identify those students in the first few weeks who are having difficulty, so they can be offered help and counseling. These students will be less likely to cheat, as they can get help and they know they are under closer observation every week.
I designed and refined this approach to assessment as part of my graduate studies in education.
Reference
Amigud, A., Arnedo-Moreno, J., Daradoumis, T., & Guerrero-Roldan, A.
(2017).
Using Learning Analytics for Preserving Academic Integrity.
The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning, 18(5).
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3103
Morris, T. (2014). An Australian guide to the risk management of VET online e-assessment: a
companion document to the research report into the veracity and
authenticity concerns of stakeholders. from http://e-standards.flexiblelearning.net.au/documents/2014_3_Australian-GUIDE-risk-management-of-VET-online-e-assessment.docx
In my paper "A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online" for the 7th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (2012), I noted written reports can be difficult for students, particularly those with English as a second language. One option I considered was increasing the English Language Competency score required for enrolling students. But this would then deny students the opportunity to improve their English while undertaking a course. Instead one approach I use in teaching "ICT Sustainability" (ANU COMP7310) is to give the students small writing tasks each week. This builds their confidence. Also it allows me to build a picture of the student's writing style and makes it harder for them to have someone else write an assignment for them undetected.
In the first two weeks of the course I have the students have use formal referencing, so I can identify those who need help with this. Some students, even graduate students, don't know how to cite sources and so are at risk of being accused of plagiarism. When faced with having to write, some students withdraw from the course (without penalty), but after some extra tuition most can meet the required standard.
One useful initiative is that students of the ANU Master of Computing now have to undertake two courses in professional communications (COMP8701 & COMP8705). Rather than just have subject matter tutors in each course dealing with writing problems, it makes sense to have specialist educators teaching communication.
Reference
Worthington, T. (2012,
July). A Green computing professional education course online: Designing
and delivering a course in ICT sustainability using Internet and
eBooks. In Computer Science & Education (ICCSE), 2012 7th International Conference on (pp. 263-266). IEEE. DOI 10.1109/ICCSE.2012.6295070
I noted an advertisement placed on my Blog by Google for a "Free Check for Plagiarism". This was a little misleading as it was actually an advertisement for the Grammarly on-line grammar checking service. Checking for material used without referencing is just one of the services offered. While a free seven day trial is offered, the catch is while you can upload your text and have it checked for free you have to supply a credit card before you can the results of the analysis.
Grammar Checking But No Correction
The service teases you by describing each problem with your document, but without signing up for the service you don't see exactly what was wrong, or where. I have an assignment due on Monday, for a course costing me several thousand dollars, so at less than $200 a year the service looked worth trying out. My assignment scored 65 out of 100, with 93 "issues", which was worrying. I ran the document through a free grammar checker in LibreOffice, made the suggested changes and then ran it through Grammarly again. This reduced the issues in Grammarly by only two and the score only went up by two points. After a few more hours working through the list I still had 60 issues and a score of 76, making it a frustrating process.
The free version seems to only allow you to upload a text document (I could not work out how to check the .DOC version). One I was in the for-fee system I was able to upload a word processing document.
One frustration if you just want to fix up your draft assignment is that Grammarly does not offer an auto fix mode. Grammarly highlights a piece of text in your document, describes the problem and the suggested solution, but will not apply the fix for you. This is probably better for learning how to write good well. ;-)
I started working my way through the issues identified by Grammarly. Mostly I did not understand the grammatical terms in the explanation (my schooling was at a time when grammar was out of fashion). Some of the terms I thought the company had just made up, such as "squinting modifiers", but there are references to this on-line (I still have no idea what a "Squinting modifier" is). So I used a technique I have applied to editing academic work: if I can't understand it, cut it out and make the document shorter.
One problem was that Grammarly's list of grammatical errors kept disappearing. I was working my way through the errors, but when I flipped from the web display to the word processor to fix and error and back, the list was gone.
Another problem is that the software does not appear to be able to recognise headings and keeps reporting them as sentence fragments.Also the software does not appear to recognise formal academic referencing and so tried to interpret these as sentences.
The process of making the corrections was tedious, but rewarding. With about one hours work, I reduced the number of "issues" from 93 to 73 and the score from 65 to 71.
One problem may be Grammarly's use of bandwidth. While waiting for my document to be checked, Grammarly display a status report as to what it was checking for. This was reassuring but seemed to be taking up 20 kbps .Each time I ran Grammarly on the same document it seemed to get slower. At one point Grammarly seemed to get stuck in a loop sequencing through the same checks over and over again and I had to cancel it after an hour. After a few times I wished for an old fashioned batch mode, where I submit the document and just get the result when complete, with no updates in between.
Plagiarism Detection
Grammarly's plagiarism detection function is not easy to use. I pressed the "plagiarism" button, it said "working" and then displayed the same grammatical error report I saw previously, with nothing about plagiarism. The generated report saied there were eight plagiarism issues, but then nothing to indicate where they are (TurnItIn usually gives false positives for like quotes and references). Another screen saied 8% unoriginal, "Some parts of your document match the text from http://www.westfield.ma.edu/uploads/psychology/APA%20format%20guide.doc", which is a APA formatting guide from a university I have never heard of. Eventually I found the text in question under the heading "Citation audit". The problem was the text "The purpose of
this document is to
", which I got into the habit of using, not from an APA guide, but IEEE standards (which almost all start that way). I tried changing it to "This document is
intended to", but that is an even more common expression. So I settled on "This is
a critical review of one journal article", which appears in no web search results.
Recently I was trying out the TurnItIn plagiarism detection software. So I fed in a plagiarism policy from a leading university, which showed a very high score, indicating material had been copied from elsewhere. It turned out that this was not plagiarism, just references to the policy in other documents by the university and in published papers. But there were a couple of cases where other educational institutions seemed\to have very similar wording in their own plagiarism policies. What worried me more was that most of the university plagiarism policies I looked at had no references cited. There are tens of thousands of documents on Australian university websites which say students should cite sources and warn of penalties for not doing so. But the students could be forgiven for being confused when these thousands of documents look very similar, with no sources cited, saying originality and citing sources is important.
Athabasca
University (AU) have an introductory course for new students, before starting their first regular course. This provides an overview of not only
how the e-learning system (Moodle) works, but issues such as
plagiarism. AU also have a social media platform called "The Landing"
for students, which looks lively and might be worth emulating at other universities.
This would help counter some of the isolation which part time and
distance students, in particular, feel. The Athabasca systesm are described in:
Virtual Platforms at Athabasca University by Rory McGreal, Jon Dron & Evelyn Ellerman, 2012 IDRC Canadian Learning Forum on Virtual Platforms, Knowledge Management and International Development. Winnipeg, February 7-8, 2012. URL: http://idl-bnc.idrc.ca/dspace/bitstream/10625/50475/1/IDL-50475.pdf
