Mail & Guardian reporter
Cheating and Australia. The two words are snug partners if we are talking cricket. But what about Australian university students cheating to get their degrees? On the Internet?
Too right, mate.
Most academics in Australia have had to deal with it to some degree, says Jenna Mead, senior lecturer in the School of English and European Languages and Literatures at the University of Tasmania.
“No one wants to admit the size of the problem,” says Mead. But there are literally thousands of cheat sites on the Net and the potential to undermine academic standards is alarming.
So Mead, along with academics at Britain’s University of Birmingham, has begun the fight back.
Malcolm Coulthard, professor of English language and linguistics at the university, and his colleague, David Woolies, a computer consultant, have developed a program to detect whether an essay has been copied by checking its lexical vocabulary of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
These features carry most of the content of an essay and are subject to much greater individual variation than other words. But the software does rely on cheating being widespread.
“By its nature the software will only assist with Internet cheating if more than one student makes use of the same essay, not an impossibility given a group of 200 students,” says Woolies. “It was also designed with the awareness that it is very easy to share disks or send e-mails these days.”
Jens Schriver, who runs the web- site Cheathouse and claims to offer 9 500 essays in 44 categories online, refuses to take a moral stand.
“How people use the product or service is their responsibility. If you want to use my service in a socially acceptable way, that is possible. The kids know what they are doing and they know the consequences.”
He insists the site is used like a library or database by many students … and by academics too, presumably.