Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
DOC Cop Delivers Free Anti-Plagiarism Tools
8/23/2007
A new service has been launched to help instructors in both higher education and K-12 institutions detect plagiarized work submitted by students. The service, DOC Cop, is an entirely Web-based tool that provides free and automated assistance in locating "source material" (ahem) used in assignments submitted to teachers.
DOC Cop was developed by Mark McCrohon, who previously worked in an Australian university and told us he got the idea from the system as he witnessed students colluding on work that was supposed to be an individual effort and turning in duplicate assignments to multiple professors.
"Often teachers and professors are oblivious to the amount of plagiarism and collusion by students so they are not even aware that they need to do something about it," McCrohon told us. "DOC Cop really helps in exposing the size of the collusion problem."
The service is available free of charge and requires only a valid e-mail address to use, which allows for a degree of anonymity. Also, according to the company, the service does not store work submitted for detection longer than the period required to perform the plagiarism check.
The service provides three types of checks:
- DOC Check, which evaluates individual documents--up to five at a time, 250,000 word maximum each--against one another;
- Corpus Check, which evaluates an unlimited number of documents (up to 12,000 words each) against one another; and
- Web Check, which compares strings of text (up to 550 words) against results found on the Web.
Both DOC Check and Corpus Check offer an unlimited number of checks per day per guest account. Web Check supports limited uses per day, depending on the load on the system at ay given time.
Submitted works are checked, and the results are returned to the user via e-mail in less than an hour. McCrohon told us he's seeing the service used by K-12 and higher education instructors to check their students' work and by university researchers to check their own work against content on the Web in order to avoid accidental plagiarism.
McCrohon said he intends to keep the service free and that he hopes to fund continued development (and ongoing costs) by getting academic institutions to promote themselves on the site.
Read More:
About the author: Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com.
Have any additional questions? Want to share your story? Want to pass along a news tip? Contact Dave Nagel, executive editor, at dnagel@1105media.com.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Utah Rolls Out Online Document Proofreading
The University of Utah has acquired a site license of CyProof's ErrNET for online document proofreading. ErrNET runs on CyProof's servers and is accessed through the user's Web browser. To check a document, users upload their files to the Web site, the cost is calculated, payment is requested, the document is processed, and the results are presented for download. The service works with PDF files.
- Payment Standard for Web Apps Goes Live
A new payment card industry (PCI) standard for Web application firewalls and source code went into effect July 1. PCI Industry Data Security standard 6.6 gives merchants a framework to ensure that the point-of-sale information uploaded into browser-based applications is sound from "top to bottom," the organization's literature said.
- U Texas San Antonio To Deploy Wireless Outdoor Emergency Notifications
The University of Texas at San Antonio has selected Cooper Notification's Wireless Audio Visual Emergency System (WAVES) Mass Notification System (MNS) for its outdoor campus emergency notification system. Through WAVES campus public safety departments can broadcast targeted voice alerts via "Giant Voice" to students, faculty, staff, and visitors.
- Moraine Valley CC Revamps Administrative Systems
Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois has selected Datatel Colleague and ActiveCampus Portal software to replace a legacy administration system. A committee consisting of campus-wide representatives chose Datatel after an 18-month evaluation of administrative software systems.
- Project Wonderland: Good Avatars Make Good Neighbors
Sun Microsystems's Project Darkstar and the Wonderland Toolkit for building 3D spaces show why virtual reality is better for education than video conferencing. And Project Wonderland has announced its first education space.
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
