Zespół Szkół Handlowych i Usługowych received a special award in the 5th edition of the Entrepreneurship Olympiad: a one-year license for the Internet Anti-Plagiarism System, which will be used to check students’ work. The school received the award after a technical-school student, Natalia Gawenda, qualified for the Regional stage of the Entrepreneurship Olympiad.
The system arouses mixed feelings because every student uses materials posted on the Internet. Students consider checking the originality of their work disadvantageous. Few people realize that intellectual-property protection concerns everyone. By creating, for example, their own websites, students may publish their own ideas, concepts and inventions there. If someone uses the data posted on their website without their consent and begins to derive material benefits from it, their attitude toward intellectual property and the need to protect it may change radically.
The Internet Anti-Plagiarism System was created mainly to protect students’ intellectual work and prevent the plagiarism of papers at higher-education institutions. Its creators developed it because they believe that education and honesty are universal human values important to our society. The system operates successfully at more than one hundred Polish higher-education institutions.
Since December 2009, the system’s creators have pursued a new initiative targeting plagiarists of websites. The Plagiat.pl service began cooperating with a law firm and expanded the range of services offered to portal and website owners to include pursuing compensation claims with the firm’s assistance.
The fact that something is available free of charge on the Internet does not mean that the source and the owner—the text’s author—do not need to be identified. In most cases, this is enough to avoid being accused of plagiarism.
The system is very simple to use. A teacher logged into it pastes a student’s work into the appropriate field and clicks the analyze icon. Using the school’s own resources—students’ or university students’ work—and Internet resources, the system subjects the document to a plagiarism-detection process. The similarity report contains the following information:
- the similarity coefficient, indicating as a percentage what part of the checked text is identical to fragments of texts found in the database and on the Internet
- a list of the longest fragments identified by the System as identical to those found in the database or online resources
- a list of sources in which fragments of texts identical to the text under examination were found
- the text of the examined document, with fragments identified as identical to fragments of texts from the database and the Internet marked
- color highlighting of all alleged borrowings originating from a specific document, which makes it easier to assess their nature.
The most important point is that the report is only intended to help the teacher assess the work, not to do so in the educator’s place. The final decision on whether a paper is plagiarized or contains, for example, quotations will depend on the person assessing it, not on the similarity report. It may happen that the nature of the work requires the use of external texts, which will be properly described with the author and source provided.
“The system will begin operating in September,” says Wiesław Stefanik, the school’s principal. “First, we want to inform the students about it and conduct a campaign. The Internet Anti-Plagiarism System is not intended to be a tool of repression. It is meant to make teachers’ work easier and change students’ awareness. I will explain what intellectual property is, why it is worth protecting, and that it concerns every one of us. Writing work independently not only develops a person but also builds their sense of self-worth. It provides the priceless awareness that one has created something of tangible value independently. That is how we want to use the Anti-Plagiarism System.”
(information by Grażyna Hanaf/data about the system comes from press materials on www.plagiat.pl)