How do I go about carrying out a trial?

 

Step 1 – Collecting in work

 

Your students will normally hand in work on paper, and unless there is some reason to change this, we see no reason to – work is still much more easily marked on paper. You do, however, need to also collect in an electronic copy of the work and also obtain the students’ permission.

 

In computing, we normally obtain the students’ permission in the form of this signed statement, handed in with the paper copy of the work:

 

Disclaimer (this is an example taken from the computing MSc dissertation cover sheet)

I certify that the material contained in this dissertation is my own work and does not contain significant portions of unreferenced or unacknowledged material. I also warrant that the above statement applies to the implementation of the project and all associated documentation.

 

In the case of electronically submitted work, I also consent to this work being stored electronically and copied for assessment purposes. Including the department’s use of plagiarism detection systems in order to check the integrity of assessed work.

 

Signed__________________

Dated __________________

 

To collect work, you can take one of two options:

 

Domino

Naturally, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. To use the domino web page, you will need to contact Mark Bryson (m.bryson@lancaster.ac.uk) or Hennie Yip (h.yip@lancaster.ac.uk) in Learning Technology and ask to have a page set up for you, and for a member of staff to come to your class to explain how to use the web page, so it needs to be sorted out well in advance of the coursework deadline. Once it has been set up, however, all you have to do is wait for the deadline to pass, then go to the web page and download a zip file containing all of the work.

 

If you have opted to step through the plagiarism process with help, you need only take a note of the web page address from which you expect to collect the work – whoever sets up the web page initially will be able to tell you this, so just make a note somewhere. If you are either processing your own work or sending me work to process you will need to actually go to that web address and download the zip file (but don’t hesitate to contact me if you have problems – ).

 

For those working without help... downloading from domino.

To download the zip file yourself: go to the web page you have been given. You will see a list of student's work, and at the very bottom of this list a link with a title matching the title given to the course. Click on this link. You will then see a grey "Download submission" button, which you should press. Two files will then be displayed. Naturally, you will need the zip file, click on the zip file and choose where on your hard drive you would like to save it. At the time of writing the zip file still included a password and the students were listed as numbers rather than names. This is expected to be changed imminently, but to check that you have an unpassworded zip file (Jisc will not accept a zip file with a password) double click on the zip file after you have downloaded it. If a dialogue appears asking you for a password, you must also download the text file on the domino web page. If your computer doesn't recognise zip files at all (unlikely, but possible on older machines), you will need to download Winzip (download, then double click on the file you download to install it) then try again.

 

When you have downloaded the text file, open it by double clicking on it. At the very top you will see the name of the zip file, and then a password on the next line. Type the password into the dialogue shown to you by the zip file, and extract the contents. If you're happy to process the numbered files, then you need only recompress (zip up) the files which were extracted. To do this select all of the individual files, then right click over one of them and select either "Send to" and "Compressed folder", or "Add to zip". This will work, but you must bear in mind that it is possible that you will have duplicate submissions from the same student (in fact, nearly all "red graded" submissions tested by Jisc are duplicates of a student's own work, so this is not that large a concern unless there are a number of students who have submitted twice - which is unlikely.) Later, you will be able to use the text file to translate from numbered files to named files on any reports you are interested in, so don't dispose of it yet!

 

If you would prefer the files to be properly named, then having unzipped the file, you will need to run a simple Java program. In order to do this, you will first need the Java Runtime Environment, which can be downloaded from here. Again, this is very straightforward, download the relevant file, then double click to install. You will then be able to use the java program, which can be downloaded here. Download the java program (called Sandpit.jar) to run it, and browse to tell it where your files are stored. Your files will then be converted into named documents, and duplicates removed. The results will be saved in a folder with the same title as your course which will be placed in the directory where your original files were kept. Currently, you will still need to recompress these files at this stage, but a new version will be available soon which will automate the remainder of this process.

 

Email

Email will take a bit more work on your part, but is more familiar to both you and the students and still not that time consuming – so it’s your choice. If you do decide to collect work via email, you will need to either give students a very specific format for the name of the file (usually their name or possibly library card number), or you will need to be prepared to rename all files as they arrive so that you don’t end up with a lot of files all with the same name.

 

Once the deadline has passed (or you have received all the files you expect to receive) and if you are processing the work yourself, you will need to put all of the files into a single zip file. To do this, firstly open the folder you have placed your files in. Select all of the files so that they are all highlighted in blue, then click on the right mouse button (whilst holding the mouse over a selected file). A menu will appear, select “Send to” then “Compressed folder”. If this option doesn’t appear, “Add to zip” will also work, if neither of these appear, you will need to install software in the form of a program called Winzip. A link to download the program is included here, and to install all you will need to do is download and then double click on the software, but if you are unsure about what you are doing – again, feel free to ask for help.

 

 

Step 2 – Submitting to JISC (if you are processing the work yourself from here)

Firstly, to submit to JISC yourself, you will need a login. I can provide you with a username and password ().

 

Go to http://www.submit.ac.uk

 

Click on user login, and then type in your username and password.

 

 

You will see a screen listing your classes – if you haven’t logged in before, you won’t have any classes, so click on “add classes”. You don’t need to worry about setting a password, as that is only for getting students to submit to JISC directly – which so far we aren’t running.

 

 

Once you’ve added a class, click on that class and then add an assignment for the work which you are about to submit. Again, the date is unimportant unless students are submitting to JISC directly themselves.

 

 

Once the assignment is added you will notice that there is a list of small clickable icons beside it. Each of them will pop up a little description of its function if you let the mouse hover over it. Initially, you should click on the “submit” icon – a document with an arrow pointed upwards beside it. The screen below will then appear.

 

If you are simply submitting one piece of work, this screen is ideal, the fields can quickly be filled in (they are all required) and then using the “browse” button find the piece of work to submit – in its original format. However, I have been operating under the assumption that you will be submitting more than one piece of work simultaneously, in which case this process would be annoying and time consuming.

 

Click on the “file upload” choice and select “zip file”.

 

 

The window will now change to look like this:

 

 

Notice that there are now no fields to fill in. Submitting using the zip file you downloaded/created earlier is currently the only way to avoid needing to type in fields for every single student, even “batch upload” requires these fields to be filled in. So now all you need to do is browse to find the zip file, then press the submit button.

 

Once you have pressed the submit button, you will see a page confirming that the documents you have submitted are right. The fields shown on this page can be left blank unless you have reason to fill them in. When you have confirmed everything, you will automatically be taken to the inbox to wait for the results. At this stage you can either wait or come back later.

 

If you choose to wait, the files will take approximately 10-15 minutes, but you must remember to keep pressing the “refresh” button on your browser or you will not see them arrive.

 

If you choose to logout and come back later, you will obviously have to navigate back to the class you set up, then click on the inbox button – an open folder with an arrow pointed into it.

 

Step 3 – Interpreting the results

 

 

The report which comes back will look much like this – bearing in mind that if you had more than 25 students there will be more than one page of results. Each student will be listed with a colour coded report icon, which when you click on it will show you the details of any potentially plagiarised sections of work. You can order the students by colour code, or choose to only show one of the colours, but you can’t yet order within a colour code, so for most subjects, the green colour code (between 1% and 25% detected) poses something of a problem. This is due to be rectified imminently, and can also be improved by running the “homemade” program discussed later.

 

The critical point is that at this stage, all you have is a list of the computer’s matches, NOT a declaration that any given colour coding is certainly plagiarised. The JISC service is there to detect potential problems, not to tell you what is right and wrong, that must remain your judgement.

 

The report shown below is 12% plagiarised according to JISC. What can be seen from the report is that it has a great number of small plagiarised sections from a wide variety of sources – all of which are listed at the start of any document.

 

 

After the listing of all of the sources, the text itself is highlighted in the colour corresponding to the source to show which text was taken from which source. Here, one of the sections which is highlighted as plagiarised appears to have been referenced, whereas the rest are not. The judgement on whether this is plagiarism, and how severe the plagiarism is remains in the hands of the lecturer.

 

 

Step 4 – Alternative results display (and under construction!)

In order to provide the flexibility in results displayed, such as removing quotes, and (at the moment) to enable the display of reports in percentage order, it is also possible to download JISC’s results and post-process them. In order to do this, you will first need the Java Runtime Environment, which can be downloaded from here (download from “get it now” button then double click on the file). You will also need this file, which will be updated from time to time (register for update notification – email angie@comp.lancs.ac.uk ).

 

Double click on the JiscDownload.jar file.

 

 

Log in to JISC, select the address text box on the web browser, and copy its contents into the box provided (see above). The text should look something like this: http://www.submit.ac.uk/t_home.asp?svr=1&r=39.7394410989726&session-id=0800d4427f4bff92d1a6a161a36df4bd

 

DON’T logout of JISC yet.

 

If you want any quotes, references* or code* removed from the displayed total (they will still be highlighted in the individual reports) then tick the relevant boxes, then press “Start”. (* not yet fully functional).

 

A list of your classes will appear, select the class you are currently interested in and press “Open class”.

 

Next, a list of the assignments given to that class will appear, select the correct assignment and press “Open assignment”.

 

 

The program will then begin processing. Wait until the JiscDownload window (as seen in the above diagram) has closed itself, then logout of JISC.

 

Go to the folder: c:\plagiarism documents\results\jisc\<the class> and double click on a file named links.html. The results will appear displayed in percentage order. If you have selected to remove quotes or other elements of the text from the overall percentage, then details of the quotes removed (etc) will also be listed in the table. The “string size” column shows the longest single unbroken (possibly) plagiarised string within the document.