Kid writes program that detects plagiarism

[Starbucks]

http://theinquirer.net/?article=17873

12 year-old's program kills plagiarism

University students tremble with fear
By Nick Farrell: Monday 16 August 2004, 06:59

A TWELVE year old kid has put the wind up countless Kiwi students by interesting their Universities in a little plagiarism program he wrote.
Nicholas Hinds, 12, who attends Otepopo School in the small town of Herbert, south of Oamaru has penned a program called Punching Plagiarism, which uses the internet search engine Google to detect if the contents of any assignment has been nicked from the Internet.

Nicholas told NZAP htat the project began last year, when his teacher Karolyn Jones heard that plagiarism was becoming a major problem at the big city universities.

The computer whiz kid developed a screenful of commands to generate the program. Meanwhile Massey University and the University of Otago are indicating that they are interested and want to evaluate it.

Unfortunately the program works so well that it netted one plagiarism suspect – step forward 12 year-old computer Whiz kid Nicholas Hinds. His teacher Frank Lewthwaite found Nicholas had apparently borrowed material from an internet site.

Write out a hundred times: "I must install code that makes my own plagiarism undetectable". µ

[griffinn]

Dumbass. At least he should have just fucking googled his own program.

[fwgx]

Does it also detect if something has been properly referenced? There's nothing wrong with copying part of someones work as long as it is properly referenced and not passed off as your own work.

edit: There have been programs to do this for some time now.

[. - .... .- -. ....]

These types of programs have been around for years - most colleges I know of run soft copies of PHD's through one to ensure that it hasn't been copied from another location.

[MonKeyRum]

He probably stole the code too!!!

[CraigF]

back whan i was at uni they were running c++ assignments thru an automated plagiarism detector as part of the source code submitting sequence. too many coders with too much time on their hands i suppose.

[zootm]

Quite an easy thing to write, actually. There's accepted ways to "fingerprint" text - with that and an automated google search (which can be easily achieved with google's free API), it can be done pretty quick. Very impressive for a 12 year-old, though.

That's actually one of the final-year uni projects I could have chosen from. One of the easier ones, mind, although there was scope to add far more complex analysis to it.

[Coman]

the idea of plagiarism is stupid. when you write about something, other than your own beliefs or ideas, like facts, you have to get it from somewhere in the first place. so then basically you're just rephrasing.

[Wolfgang]

That's the whole point of having references. They're a pain in the arse, but they're what draws the line between plagiarism and quoting. Usually plagiarism occurs for large chunks of work, or the whole thing, whereas when quoting someone else's work you usually quote just a few lines or a phrase.

[whiteflip]

Copying one persons work is plagersim. Copying many peoples work is research.

[fwgx]

Passing someone elses work off as your own is plagerism. If you reference it you are not passing it off as your own. Stealing terminology is not plagerism but it's good practice to say where you got the terminology from.

[lostonline]

Originally posted by whiteflip
Copying one persons work is plagersim. Copying many peoples work is research.

It's resarch as long as you reference it and include some explanation relating it to your work.

[fwgx]

Research involves standing on the shoulders of others. Either giants, or lots of ordinary sized people.