Seminar series for students, Semester 1, 2008
When: Tuesday 4th March, 12noon
Where: Room 135, Building 26.
Topic: “Plagiarism: why it happens, how to detect it
(with Damocles),
and, most importantly, how to prevent it”
Abstract:
Ideas, and their expressions
in words, are the academic’s stock-in-trade. Plagiarism is thus often seen as
the cardinal academic sin. Plagiarism is also seen as a major offence when
committed by students: at best a serious case of
sloppiness, at worst a form of cheating. In this talk I will reflect on eight
years of hunting plagiarism, both in student work and academic papers. I will
consider some of the reasons that students plagiarise, and discuss how we might
modify our assessment and teaching practices to reduce the incidence of
plagiarism.
In the course of this
reflection, I will demonstrate the Damocles plagiarism detection system (http://viper.infotech.monash.edu.au/damocles/about/),
which I developed. Damocles has now been used in hundreds of units at Monash,
in IT, BusEco, Arts, and Law. Damocles is at heart a
text retrieval system, honed for a particular purpose. I will indicate some of
the issues I have encountered in developing such a system, and migrating it to a “production” environment.
Speaker’s Biography:
Dr David Squire is a senior
lecturer in the Clayton School of Information Technology. Prior to joining the
Faculty of Information Technology at Monash in 2000, he was a Research Fellow
in the Computer Vision Group at the