If this fits your school’s needs, please e-mail him.
best,
debbie
"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence
to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question
it." -- J. Brownowski
From: Ed Gehringer <efg@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2021 5:59 AM
To: Debbie <debbie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Plagiarism detection in online exams
Hi Debbie,
Usually I email you about experiments in peer assessment, but today I'm looking
for instructors who give online exams and would like to have a better way to
detect when students copy answers from each other. I have been working on a
program that runs several statistical tests for plagiarism on each pair of
exams submitted for a course. When the answers are suspiciously similar to
each other, the instructor is notified. I'm planning to submit an NSF proposal
on this strategy in about two weeks.
Software for detecting exam plagiarism is not new, but it has not been widely
used for online exams. This is because most of the algorithms work only on
multiple-choice questions, and most exams include other kinds of questions.
Also, detection has not been very reliable; there are a lot of false positives,
which means that instructors must manually check several pairs of exam "papers"
against each other before finding a pair of students who can be charged with
plagiarism.
In this project, we will provide algorithms for checking fill-in-the-blank and
essay answers, as well as multiple-choice answers. We also plan to use a
machine-learning approach to help the program "learn" what combinations of
statistical test results are most likely to indicate plagiarism.
I am looking for a few instructors to join me in this research. If you would
be interested in using this detection strategy in your class, and reporting the
results to me (you don't need to send the exam answers themselves), please let
me know.
Thanks in advance for your interest,
Ed
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Edward F. Gehringer Phone: +1 919-515-2066
Professor of Computer Science E-mail: <mailto:efg@xxxxxxxx> efg@xxxxxxxx
North Carolina State University
<https://ncsu-dot-yamm-track.appspot.com/Redirect?ukey=1YyGfz8NzIPB2idDjUILjnNp43laVKKct5OUts6zEOzU-907559312&key=YAMMID-35528038&link=http%3A%2F%2Fgo.ncsu.edu%2Fefg>
http://go.ncsu.edu/efg
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