To Turnitin or Not to Turnitin

March 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Turnitin.com, scourge of plagiarizing students, might be just a little bit too picky. And those student claims of innocence might just be true.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a study of Turnitin and SafeAssign (a part of Blackboard I didn’t know about) done at Texas Tech. The researchers submitted 400 papers to both services. Turnitin pointed its accusing finger 2-3 times as often as did SafeAssign.

The big problem is that Turnitin is just too damned suspicious.

detect / 13 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed via kwout

Thanks Ed (Inside Higher Ed and I are on a last-name basis), but I figured this out by myself a couple of weeks ago. We don’t have Turnitin at Montclair, but one of our adjuncts uses it, and he failed a student for plagiarizing a paper. She protested. So the matter was referred to the department chair – me. The teacher sent me the Turnitin report, and there it was in black and white: Her 1400-word paper on Filipino Americans had a “similarity index” of 69%.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I’d never seen a Turnitin report, so I checked out some of the sources. The first flagged item was the following.

The Philippines is located in the southeastern portion of Asia. Her neighbor on the north is the republic of China (Taiwan of Formosa), while on the west is Communist Vietnam.

I entered the URL of the source (#2 in the summary sheet in the picture above. In case the print is too small for you to read, it’s filipinamates.com. Turnitin was hot on the scent, and I followed. This was the first screen I found.

Not wanting to let a clear case of plagiarism slip by, I had to click on Enter. I found myself with this menu.

I won’t bore you with the details of my further searches for the sources of plagiarism offered by this menu except to say that Trekkie Monster from “Avenue Q” was right.

The other sources listed by Turnitin were equally non-inculpatory though not nearly so interesting. If you write in your paper that the area of Mindanao is 36,670 square miles, and someone else put that fact in their paper or on their website, you’re toast in Turnitin’s book. It even flagged passages the student had put in quotation marks.

To quote Ed again, “All of the members of the Texas Tech team said that they emerged from their study with serious reservations about using the services.”

So did I.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up -- Or Can You?

March 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Getting data is hard. It’s time consuming and laborious and often, truth be told, not all that interesting. On top of that, you worry about validity – does the data set really tap what I say I’m studying? And in the end, it may turn out that the results are disappointing; you wind up with something reviewers won’t think is worth reporting.

It’s not like medical science, with its strict and precise definitions and measurements – those doctors in white lab coats carefully testing the effects of drugs and coming up with results that help humanity.

But now medical science shows us the way to get convincing data, data that shows results: make the stuff up.

Doctor Admits Pain Studies Were Frauds, Hospital Says - NYTimes.com via kwout

Concocted. That’s the word they use (in case you have trouble reading the print in the boxes – the full story is here). Dr. Reuben concocted data. Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe because no huge drug company like Pfizer is underwriting my “research” that shows their pain drugs to be so highly effective.

I’m going to repeat a quote I posted a couple of months ago. It’s from a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine written well before this latest bit of news about Dr. Reuben:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

More Guns, More Killing

March 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

You know what the responses will be even before you read them. The anti-gun side will point to the shootings in Alabama and say, “Look what happens in a place where any nut can get his hands on two AK-47s or M-16s and a .38.” The pro-gun faction will point to the shootings in
Germany and say, “See, even strict gun laws can’t prevent this sort of thing.”

Either way, it’s hard to make the “more guns, less crime” argument, though I’m sure John Lott will try. If only everyone in those Alabama towns had been carrying a handgun, so goes this line of reasoning, someone would have shot the guy after he’d killed only a few people. Given the circumstances of the killings, that seems unlikely. And given Alabama’s gun laws, quite possibly some of those victims or people nearby did have guns. The police officers who chased him certainly did, though as far as their own safety is concerned, their bullet-proof vests were far more important than their weapons.

In both these cases, the killings were possible only because the killer had access to very lethal weapons. Yes Germany has strict gun laws, but the killer’s father had eighteen guns in the house, and they were probably all legal. He was what some people would call a “gun nut.” Others use the term “gun enthusiast.” (We like enthusiasm, so it’s O.K. to have your own private arsenal just so long as you’re enthusiastic about it.)

Here’s my prediction for what will happen. Some European countries, maybe even Germany, will make their gun laws even tighter. In the US, people will shake their heads, cry, pray, and focus on the personal stories of the killer and victims. Will Alabama or any of the easy-gun states change their laws? Of course not.

Here in the US, we will focus on individual explanations. “Authorities Search For a Motive,” says the CNN headline. Gee, it’s a shame what happened, but what can you do? There’s just no way to predict when someone will snap.

European authorities will think in situational terms: how can we change the situation so that no matter how angry or deranged someone is, he can’t commit this level of slaughter?”

Why Is Half the Football Team in My Class?

March 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post, I quoted Ann Coulter’s scornful put-down of Keith Olbermann’s academic credentials – a degree in Communications from the agricultural college at Cornell.

“Communications” is a major, along with “recreation science,” most commonly associated with linemen at USC.*

Apparently Coulter’s column isn’t fact-checked, for in reality (maybe her column isn’t reality-checked either) those USC footballers are much more likely to major in Sociology.

Last fall, USA today published data showing the clustering of athletes (juniors and seniors only) into certain majors. At some schools, it was Interdisciplinary Studies (LSU, ASU). At USC, 57% of the football team (22 out of 38) were majoring in Sociology. Other football teams that clustered in Sociology included

• Florida State (54%)
• Hawaii (47%)
• Oklahoma (44%)
• SMU (48%)
• Duke (40%)

Here’s a screen shot of the interactive chart USA Today published. The darkness of the blue shading indicates the degree of concentration of majors. That dark blue rectangle at the end of Social Science is the 80% of the LSU basketball team that are majoring in Sociology (four out of five players – a small N but a tall one.)

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

At the actual site, as you drag the mouse over each rectangle, it reveals the information (school, sport, major, percentage, N).

It would be nice to have some more information how athletes make these decisions. Why does the basketball team cluster in one major while the football team prefers another? And why do jocks on some teams or at some schools go their own way?

------------

* I guess Recreation Science is what used to be called Phys. Ed.

There’s an anecdote – it may even be true – about Joe Namath, who had come from Alabama with a huge (for its time) signing bonus on his dubious knee to play for the New York Jets. At a press conference, one of the New York sports reporters asks, “So what’d you major in at Alabama, Phys.Ed.?”

“Nah,” says Namath, “I wasn’t smart enough for Phys.Ed. I majored in journalism.”