A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. May 2017 / Plagiarism is a serious problem in academia. It is prevalent in the computing discipline where students are expected to submit source code assignments as part of their assessment; hence, there is every likelihood of copying. Ideally, students can collaborate with each other to perform a programming task, but it is expected that each student submit his/her own solution for the programming task. More so, one might conclude that the interaction would make them learn programming. Unfortunately, that may not always be the case. In undergraduate courses, especially in the computer sciences, if a given class is large, it would be unfeasible for an instructor to manually check each and every assignment for probable plagiarism. Even if the class size were smaller, it is still impractical to inspect every assignment for likely plagiarism because some potentially plagiarised content could still be missed by humans. Therefore, automatically checking the source code programs for likely plagiarism is essential. There have been many proposed methods that attempt to detect source code plagiarism in undergraduate source code assignments but, an ideal system should be able to differentiate actual cases of plagiarism from coincidental similarities that usually occur in source code plagiarism. Some of the existing source code plagiarism detection systems are either not scalable, or performed better when programs are modified with a number of insertions and deletions to obfuscate plagiarism. To address this issue, a graph-based model which considers structural similarities of programs is introduced to address cases of plagiarism in programming assignments. This research study proposes an approach to measuring cases of similarities in programming assignments using an existing plagiarism detection system to find similarities in programs, and a graph-based model to annotate the programs. We describe experiments with data sets of undergraduate Java programs to inspect the programs for plagiarism and evaluate the graph-model with good precision. An evaluation of the graph-based model reveals a high rate of plagiarism in the programs and resilience to many obfuscation techniques, while false detection (coincident similarity) rarely occurred. If this detection method is adopted into use, it will aid an instructor to carry out the detection process conscientiously. / MT 2017

Plagiarism detection is gaining increasing importance due to requirements for integrity in education. The existing research has investigated the problem of plagrarim detection with a varying degree of success. The literature revealed that there are two main methods for detecting plagiarism, namely extrinsic and intrinsic. This thesis has developed two novel approaches to address both of these methods. Firstly a novel extrinsic method for detecting plagiarism is proposed. The method is based on four well-known techniques namely Bag of Words (BOW), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Stylometry and Support Vector Machines (SVM). The LSA application was fine-tuned to take in the stylometric features (most common words) in order to characterise the document authorship as described in chapter 4. The results revealed that LSA based stylometry has outperformed the traditional LSA application. Support vector machine based algorithms were used to perform the classification procedure in order to predict which author has written a particular book being tested. The proposed method has successfully addressed the limitations of semantic characteristics and identified the document source by assigning the book being tested to the right author in most cases. Secondly, the intrinsic detection method has relied on the use of the statistical properties of the most common words. LSA was applied in this method to a group of most common words (MCWs) to extract their usage patterns based on the transitivity property of LSA. The feature sets of the intrinsic model were based on the frequency of the most common words, their relative frequencies in series, and the deviation of these frequencies across all books for a particular author. The Intrinsic method aims to generate a model of author “style” by revealing a set of certain features of authorship. The model’s generation procedure focuses on just one author as an attempt to summarise aspects of an author’s style in a definitive and clear-cut manner. The thesis has also proposed a novel experimental methodology for testing the performance of both extrinsic and intrinsic methods for plagiarism detection. This methodology relies upon the CEN (Corpus of English Novels) training dataset, but divides that dataset up into training and test datasets in a novel manner. Both approaches have been evaluated using the well-known leave-one-out-cross-validation method. Results indicated that by integrating deep analysis (LSA) and Stylometric analysis, hidden changes can be identified whether or not a reference collection exists.

When you are assigned a research paper, you will spend many hours searching the library and the Internet for materials relevant to your topic. It is important to develop a system to organize and save the information you wish to use for your paper. After completing this interactive tutorial you will be able to create a research log to organize and save the information from a web site. This flash tutorial requires a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher.

Baigiamajame magistro darbe nagrinėjamos plagiatų aptikimas, vertinami skirtingi algoritmai, užsienio šalių patirtis šioje srityje. Išnagrinėti pagrindiniai būdai, kuriais remiantis nustatomi plagiatai. Darbo metu sukurta plagiatų patikros sistema ir įskiepis skirtas Moodle mokymosi aplinkai. Sistemoje naudojamo algoritmo efektyvumas matuojamas atsižvelgiant į duomenų saugojimo, bei gavimo būdus iš duomenų bazės, taip pat ir jo patikimumas. Baigiamajame darbe nagrinėjama kitų plagiatų patikros programų tikrinamų darbų skaičiaus įtaka jų darbo efektyvumui, bei lyginama su sukurtu produktu. / Main goal of this work was to create antiplagiarism system for Moodle. Before system development every aspect of it was researched. Hardest thing to design was algorithm for plagiarism detection, because it must be quite fast and accurate. After that plagiarism detection system was developed in PHP and SQL languages there were performed different speed tests. Created algorithm's one work processing time almost doesn't depend on work count in database, so this system is limited only by the amount of RAM and HDD space server has.

With the Internet being widely spread, databases are becoming more and more accessible. Unfortunately, this process brings some problems alongside obvious advantages. Easily accessible information causes raise of plagiarism, a phenomena of people finding some creative works, slightly (if at all) changing them and presenting as their own pieces. This work presents an overview of various methods that can be used in computer software in order to automatically perform document analysis and comparison for detecting similarity instances. In the work, such software development stages are given as well as software testing and considerations on semantic message analysis method integration in the system.

Dissertation (Ph.D)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed May 28, 2009). Advisor: Gerald Ponder; submitted to the School of Education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-185).

Thesis, LLD--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Includes summaries in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references.

Plagiarism is a serious, yet widespread type of research misconduct, and is often neglected in developing countries. Despite its far-reaching implications, plagiarism is poorly acknowledged and discussed in the academic setting, and insufficient evidence exists in Latin America and developing countries to inform the development of preventive strategies. In this context, we present a longitudinal case study of seven instances of plagiarism and cheating arising in four consecutive classes (2011–2014) of an Epidemiology Masters’ program in Lima, Peru, and describe the implementation and outcomes of a multifaceted, “zero-tolerance” policy aimed at introducing research integrity. Two cases involved cheating in graded assignments, and five cases correspond to plagiarism in the thesis protocol. Cases revealed poor awareness and high tolerance to plagiarism, poor academic performance, and widespread writing deficiencies, compensated with patchwriting and copy-pasting. Depending on the events’ severity, penalties included course failure (6/7) and separation from the program (3/7). Students at fault did not engage in further plagiarism. Between 2011 and 2013, the Masters’ program sequentially introduced a preventive policy consisting of: (i) intensified research integrity and scientific writing education, (ii) a stepwise, cumulative writing process; (iii) honor codes; (iv) active search for plagiarism in all academic products; and (v) a “zero tolerance” policy in response to documented cases. No cases were detected in 2014. In conclusion, plagiarism seems to be widespread in resource-limited settings and a greater response with educational and zero-tolerance components is needed to prevent it. / This study was funded by the training Grant 2D43 TW007393-06 awarded to the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 6 (NAMRU-6) by the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Academic Integrity is central to the security of higher education academic standards and qualifications. However in recent years threats to integrity and educational quality have increased throughout the world because of high rates of academic misconduct. The author of the portfolio was Principal Investigator and project leader for the EU funded project Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across Europe (IPPHEAE, 2010-2013) and has continued to build on the findings from the research since the project ended. Over 5000 survey responses were collected from over 200 institutions across 27 European Union (EU) countries, through on-line questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, involving higher education students, academics, managers, researchers and people concerned with HE nationally. The portfolio draws on the authors significant contributions to the IPPHEAE research which explored the nature and efficacy of institutional policies designed to address these threats and promote ethical and scholarly academic conduct. Although some effective policies were evident, for example in UK, Sweden, Austria and Slovakia, the findings indicated that much more could be done in every country studied to improve guidance and support given to both students and teachers. Great disparities were evident across Europe in what was perceived as acceptable academic conduct, procedures to investigate allegations of student cheating and penalties applied for different offences. This initial research highlighted inherent inconsistencies, lack of transparency and unfairness in student outcomes. It is remarkable that such major policy and conceptual differences should exist despite moves to harmonise educational systems across the EU. There was a perception among survey respondents that outcomes and penalties for students found to be cheating would vary within an institution according to which lecturer found the problem. The author’s contributions to the body of knowledge include a unique insight into how well HEIs in different part of Europe appreciate current challenges to academic integrity and how their perceptions are driving national and institutional policies. Key outputs from the authors’ own research include the Academic Integrity Maturity Model (AIMM), which calculates a maturity profile for each country studies based on nine metrics, calculated from the survey data. AIMM was applied in the country-bycountry report comparing policies across the 27 EU countries. AIMM has since been repurposed as an institutional evaluation and benchmarking tool and forms the basis for the Scorecard for Academic Integrity Development (SAID). The portfolio contains five different publications that cover the main elements of the authors’ research in this specific field: a journal paper, a conference paper, a book chapter, the EU-wide comparison report and an expert witness report presented to an international forum. All the publications have been subject to peer review. Given the vast scale and scope of this research, the author has collaborated with many other researchers in the course of the underlying research and developments. Eight main co-researchers were given access to the portfolio and draft thesis and each has provided a statement about their view of the research. The author is now building on earlier research, in conjunction with the global research community. Further funding has just been provided to extend IPPHEAE to the Balkan region (Council of Europe) and to create a European Network for Academic Integrity (Erasmus+). The long-term goal is to improve the security and integrity of qualifications and systems in education and research throughout the world. Only if the future leaders of government, business, education and commerce become convinced of the need for ethical values and integrity, will we begin to see long-term positive changes to cultural values affecting wider society.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether Blasco Ibáñez in his novel La Horda used Pío Baroja's Material which was published in La Lucha por la Vida. Baroja claimed that he did. Therefore, this paper compares the two novels to discover similarities in their settings, their plots, and their characters.