Monday, February 10, 2003		Feature

UNIVERSITY students who think they can get away with cheating must think again. "Web crawling robots" are out hunting for them and monitoring all their activities.

A Sydney university has become the first to invest in computer software using "Web crawling robots" to hunt through millions of Internet documents to catch students who cheat.

The academic staff at University of Technology, Sydney, voted to buy a site licence allowing them to use the plagiarism detection software in a bid to stem the growing tide of students who cut-and-paste from the World Wide Web, says a report in Sydney Morning Herald.

The UTS move comes as universities in Britain turn to a national computer system, the Plagiarism Advisory Service, to help identify copied work.

The director of the Institute for Interactive Media at UTS, Shirley Alexander, said Turnitin.com would allow academics to submit suspect assignments university-wide for testing.

It was up to individual academics how they used the system, she said. They could submit every assignment a student submitted electronically, choose a selection at random or only those that appeared to be suspect.

Professor Alexander said the software, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, and costing $13,700 a year, used Web-crawling robots to check documents on a daily basis.

"These Web crawling robots retrieve millions of documents from the internet every day, focusing on sites like online paper mills, academic resources, on-line encyclopedias and news agencies," she said on Tuesday.

"Turnitin.com also retains information about each paper submitted for checking, thus discouraging students from copying previous students’ work."

Professor Alexander said Turnitin.com was part of a two-pronged attack on cheating. The second involved looking at why students plagiarised.

She believes only a small number of students plan to cheat; others fell into the trap of leaving assignments to the last minute or failed to understand the assessment task.

It was, according to her, important to catch cheats. "It’s not good for the student and it lowers standards. It’s also disheartening for other students who know it’s going on."

A spokesman for the University of Western Sydney (UWS) said one of the pitfalls of the software was that only assignments submitted electronically could currently be checked.