The Internet has made it easier for people to search for information, but it has also made it much more likely that students will plagiarize for their term papers or theses.
To help professors nationwide combat plagiarism, National Sun Yat-sen University professor of communication management Sean Chen (陳祥) recently developed the nation’s first Chinese-language identification system that could help determine whether students have turned in other people’s work and passed it off as their own.
The system, which was activated on Monday, can scan and identify similarities between students’ papers or theses and other articles in digital format within about 10 minutes by using Internet search engines such as Google or Yahoo, Chen told reporters.
The system will highlight parts in any paper that may have been copied from somewhere else and provide teachers with the source of the original material as evidence of plagiarism, Chen said.
“The system can be used to detect doctoral dissertations, master’s theses or any other article available online,” Chen said.
“We have also created our own database [of Chinese-language material],” Chen said.
Chen said he created the system because academic plagiarism had become a problem in Taiwan.
The university’s Research Center for the Prevention of Digital Plagiarism said about 300 university students across the country had uploaded their own papers to the system since it was activated and to test whether the system can catch students who plagiarize.
Discussions have already appeared on college bulletin boards about how to fool the system, the center said.
As many as 20 schools, including National Taiwan Normal University, have contacted the center to screen their students’ papers, the center said.
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