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Offering the opportunity to iteratively paraphrase copied content to lower similarity scores is nothing to do with education, says Július Kravjar
It is a curious quirk of academic practice that what are commonly referred to as plagiarism detection systems do not actually detect plagiarism.
The primary goal of these systems, rather, is to identify passages of text in the document under scrutiny that are similar to passages contained in the repository of documents used for comparison. Even after many years of development, the various programson the market do a far-from-perfect job in that regard. They cannot reliably detect paraphrases, for instance, or plagiarism of texts that are in other languages or are electronically inaccessible.
But this is far from these programs’ worst failing. Without careful restrictions on their use, they can become not so much a hindrance as a boon to plagiarists.
Specifically, when universities allow their students to access plagiarism detection tools repeatedly, without any controls, those tools can be used by intentional plagiarists – and, potentially, contract cheating services with...