John A. Nichols, Chairperson
History Department

212-D Spotts World Culture Building
Slippery Rock University
Slippery Rock, PA  16057-1326
Office: 724-738-2410
Fax: 724-738-4762

To:  TLTR Grants Committee

From:  John A. Nichols, Chairperson and Professor History Department

Date:  February 10, 2004

Regarding: TLTR 2003 Grant’s Report

This represents my written report for TLTR funding in 2003 for the site license to use two software companies to check for plagiarized papers. The cost was $674. 

Our Taskforce consisted of Joseph Harry, Deborah Hutchins, Joyce Penrose, David Valentine, Nelson Ng, and myself as Chairperson.  Joyce Penrose never met with the Taskforce nor responded to my emails.  While Joseph Harry responded to my email he did not meet with the rest of us.  We met twice to discuss: first, what companies to consider purchasing a site license; and second, recommendations of our findings.  The companies were: CopyCatch: www.copycatch.freeserve.co.uk ; TurnItIn: www.turnitin.com; EVE: www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml; Plagiarism.com: www.plagiarism.com; Phrase Finder: http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/; Edutie.com: www.edutie.com; Plagiserve.com: www.plagiserve.com ; Jplag: www.jplag.de; Surfwax Scholar http://www.scholar.surfwax.com and R.Meza (Spanish language program) http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~rmeza/proyectos/detectaCopias/index.html.

Research was conducted on these companies and the three most suitable were Turnitin, Eve, and Surfwax that appeared to be the best for doing a pilot study.  We found in the pricing that Turnitin was more than we wanted to afford, but TLTR gave us $674 to allow a limited number of faculty the ability to use Eve and Surfwax for the study.

In addition to uploading student papers to these two sites, the subcommittee was also interested in discussing academic integrity and revising the SRU handbook for students that would revise the policy now in place if academic cheating took place. 

To date three of the above professors have used Eve and Surfwax.  The results were mixed.  In the fall semester 2003, Nelson Ng uploaded 24 student papers that were about 20 pages each using Eve.  He left in the afternoon and by the next morning reviewed the results.  The suspected range of plagiarism ranged from 1% to 15% but when asked for a higher percentage the results can back with no plagiarism discovered.  But when Nelson reviewed the suspected sources, the majority was for common generic phrases or standard words.  His sense is that little was borrowed from the Internet and some may have come from his student papers written in past semesters.

David Valentine also checked student papers in the fall semester and had some terrible results with the Eve software program.  Of the 25 papers checked, 7 had significant plagiarism but 3 students swore they had not plagiarized and on checking found that the results were false positives much like Nelson Ng’s.  Moreover, in uploading the whole paper versus only a few pages, Valentine found that Eve was inconsistent, in one case it said the work was plagiarized while in the second instance it was not. His recommendation is not to use Eve as a software program to check student papers.

Between semesters, Eve upgraded to a newer version and I uploaded 12 papers written this past week.  In all cases, the results came back as no evidence of plagiarism but when I up loaded my own paper published in the past two years it came back as 99% plagiarized. I was not surprised in that Eve went to the American Historical Review in which it was published as the plagiarized source.

Given these mixed results, I wrote a grant for TLTR to fund Turnitin as the next software program that everyone in the University could use.  The cost was high, $9100 for one year of use, and it was turned down mainly because after one year how could it be funded year after year if SRU wants to continue its use. So I thought that perhaps the state system would be interested in funding this much like it does with Blackboard. To see if anyone in the SSHE was using Turnitin or any other plagiarism check company, I emailed persons at the other schools:  results so far:  most schools do not some are considering it like IUP and one already uses it: Shippenburg.

Cc:  Valentine
       Ng
       Hutchins
       Harry