Cheating isn’t new. However, when innovative use of technology-based tools like ‘GitHub’ or ‘ChatGPT’ in cheating gains ground, we must take a hard look. Even as we realise that pressures of modern education on both students and faculty is very high, cheating can never be condoned. Whereas GitHub provides a wide range of features and services related to version control and collaborative software development and is incredibly helpful for individuals and teams working on software projects and other collaborative endeavours, its free access has seen students use it to cheat in their project-based learning and assignments. ‘ChatGPT’ is evolving and the ‘opportunities’ it provides to bypass originality with conviction are massive.
Academic honesty should be paramount in education. Until recently, lecture notes and the library were the only resources to refer to when writing a paper for a conference or a journal. Things are not same anymore. The new age students have access to more information than ever before and on any subject. While this must necessarily produce better content, what is found in reality is far from truth.
Whether writing assignments, or answering questions or writing examinations, there seems to be an element of dishonesty and an urge to cheat. Whereas internet is the highway, several technology tools are the vehicles and enablers. Students cheat for many reasons. Learning pressures, poor planning, poor time-management, or simply being uninterested, or social pressures are all important reasons. Whatever the reason, cheating is unacademic and conflicts with the integrity of academic pursuits.
If, however cheating is ingrained in the systems we follow, there is a need to understand how it is done, if we were to prevent it. Using images and pictures in the paper, synonymizing the paper, changing the word order in a sentence, getting help from a custom writing service, submitting as PDF or paraphrasing the paper are all methods to get around the anti-plagiarism tools. Sometimes, students put a lot of creativity into cheating. Text modification is most prevalent. Instead of writing an original text, students resort to text modification. Just in September 2019, ‘Unicheck’ detected 7% of text modifications. Modifind, a unique feature in Unicheck identifies digital text modifications automatically by tracking character replacement, special fonts, colors, and symbols as well as different document layers instantly.
Even as text modification still needs some human creativity, Digital text modification doesn’t need any and is done by technology tools. Rephrasing tools such as ‘QuillBot’ an AI-based paraphrasing tool can rephrase sentences and paragraphs while preserving the original meaning. ‘Paraphrase Online’ is a free tool that can rephrase text to help avoid repetition or improve clarity. ‘Spinbot’ is a text rewriter that uses advanced algorithms to rephrase sentences and create unique content. ‘Prepostseo’ is a paraphrasing tool that can rewrite sentences to make them more original.
It is very difficult to understand a collective notion of how students plagiarize someone else’s work, with the help of technology. Sometimes letter substitution or using letter duplicates from other languages is resorted to. Sometimes, some students add non-existing or unrelated references to their paper instead of searching for relevant references. Another way to cheat is to insert unique white-colored text to mask plagiarism. Different characters and spaces in white are added, so that the teacher does not see them. Those who are more creative, will present their paper in image formats so the instructors cannot run it through anti-plagiarism software.
Turnitin’s algorithm is designed to detect similarities between submitted documents and its extensive database, which includes previously submitted papers, academic publications, and content from the internet. It can recognize both verbatim copying and paraphrasing that may be used to disguise plagiarism. Similarly, Grammarly. Copyscape, Plagscan that offers features like batch checking and integrating with Learning Management Systems (LMS), Unicheck, SmallSEOTools, and Quetext that scans content against various sources to detect potential plagiarism are all important cheat prevent tools.
Students may believe that their Teachers / Instructors don’t know all the tricks up their sleeve. Technological or otherwise. But remember, teachers make the difference. Not class rooms or their laptops. And then, there are advanced plagiarism checker solutions that recognize numerous types of student cheating. Plagiarism is the plague of education and scholarship. Checking a paper thoroughly before submitting it to an educator is the only way faculty and students can improve their work and maintain their and their institution’s credibility.