@MyBCU #contractcheating 1 Using Turnitin As a Tool For Attribution In Cases Of Contract Cheating Thomas Lancaster & Robert Clarke Birmingham City University HEA STEM Conference 2014

@MyBCU #contractcheating 2 Contract Cheating A student uses a third party to produce academic work for them

@MyBCU #contractcheating 3 Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At Birmingham City University

@MyBCU #contractcheating 4 Business Card Distributed During Induction Week At Birmingham City University

@MyBCU #contractcheating 5 Turnitin Turnitin is a text matching service, used to identify students copying from external services and colluding with other students

@MyBCU #contractcheating 6 Contract Cheating Work produced using contract cheating is original, so Turnitin will not identify sources for this work

@MyBCU #contractcheating 7 Attribution The challenging process where a contract cheating detective tries to identify the university that student contract cheating requests found online are from Most of our work is based around the Freelancer.com agency site

@MyBCU #contractcheating 8 Some Success Running student contract cheating requests through Turnitin has started to show interesting results for a small number cases

@MyBCU #contractcheating 9 Turnitin Example 1 Large match to assignment brief

@MyBCU #contractcheating 10 Turnitin Example 2 Multiple small hits from the same source

@MyBCU #contractcheating 11 Turnitin Example 3 No matches when first posted But received request to view from another university when it matched one of their assignments 2 months later

@MyBCU #contractcheating 12 Turnitin Example 4 Turnitin Report from Posting in Jan 2014 Shows that same stock assignment has been used before in previous years Brainmass.com provides stock answers

@MyBCU #contractcheating 13 Turnitin Example 5a Freelancer request to re-write assignment Source located by Turnitin

@MyBCU #contractcheating 14 Turnitin Example 5b We try to follow up other postings. This was made by the same person as before and matches the same source

@MyBCU #contractcheating 15 Turnitin Example 6 Multiple sources for EdExcel courses Example of “false positive” matches

@MyBCU #contractcheating 16 Turnitin Example 7 Turnitin also matches public web sites Particularly useful if “old data” not found by Google

@MyBCU #contractcheating 17 Turnitin Example 8 Multiple hits, but no response to Turnitin requests Possible problems: Staff Turnover University no longer registered with Turnitin

@MyBCU #contractcheating 18 Current Use Turnitin is now allowing contract cheating detectives to attribute work that has not been identified using other methods 29% success rate based on sample in paper Recommendation – academics should load all assignment specifications into Turnitin

@MyBCU #contractcheating 19 Resources Wikipedia: Contract Cheating Special Interest Group (supported by the Higher Education Academy): bin/webadmin?A0=CONTRACTCHEATING Materials from recent HEA STEM Contract Cheating Workshop: ng_Contract_Birmingham

@MyBCU #contractcheating 20 For More Information Thomas Lancaster Website: Twitter: Robert Clarke Slides Available At