UK’s Educational System in Conflict with Contract Plagiarism
Do you know what makes a tragedy in playwriting?
When both sides of the conflict are in the right, in their own way, but they never come to a peaceful solution.
When I come to such problem, my thoughts always go to the rules of dramaturgy and the unhappy endings tragedies tend to have. Today, as I find United Kingdom in the midst of such struggle, I cannot let that happen.
This is a recap of what is going on in UK’s educational system, what dangers that they’ve come face to face with, and what way both sides can come to a solution.
Sophisticated Cheating and its Severe Repercussions
In the past several years, universities in UK have been experiencing a rise in all forms of cheating reaching numbers in tens of thousands. Among rare ones like student impersonation, educators have come across one that turned out to be the toughest nut yet to be cracked: contract plagiarism.
Contact plagiarism is what ought to be called sophisticated cheating, because it requires (a) deep pockets, and (b) guts, to go with something so obviously wrong for one’s academic career.
Committing this type of plagiarism is comically effortless. Students go online and order a paper of any kind and any type of difficulty. They even can specify what mark they would like to receive for it. Then they pay for the services, and that’s it. The paper arrives just in time for the due date, and students are free to wait for their pre-ordered mark.
One of the most reputable and expensive in the world, UK education equals a first-class ticket, a bond that gives the holder a path to the top choice of jobs, positions and salaries. It grants an air of sophistication and respect. In other words, it is worthwhile.
But with common occurrence of contract plagiarism, among its less industry-level cousins, UK educational system is taking a hit.
On the other side of the struggle we can see thousands upon thousands of students who defend themselves by claiming that high tuition makes them pursue short-term financially beneficial endeavors, rather than developing their academic prowess. For many of them, English is a second language, and they insist that the system is designed to punish non-native speakers. Each of them with their personal circumstances, some of them are now expelled or facing other repercussions for their actions.
The Villain and its Biggest Strength
So who’s the villain in our story that managed to bring so much unrest and destruction on one of the oldest and respectable educational systems?
Contract plagiarism is being operated through at least a thousand essay mills, special services that work online and take orders for any type of written work. Their fees can vary depending on due date and difficulty of the topic, but it never comes cheap.
The mills deviously provide the fair use policy disclaimers and under a pretense of supplying study guides, write students’ papers, essays and PhD dissertations for them, cheekily guaranteeing to pass any plagiarism check with flying colors.
And like any self-respecting villain, they are not so easy to overcome.
Educators are having a hard time figuring out what papers were written by plagiarism contractors and what were genuinely honest. Regular plagiarism checkers that most universities have installed cannot solve the problem either, as those checkers can only find similarities with internet sources or with internal university libraries. Essay mills write fully original papers, throwing checkers off their tracks.
The situation turned so dire that Jo Johnson, UK Universities Minister, had to step up and say this:
“This form of cheating is unacceptable, and every university should have strong policies and sanctions in place to detect and deal with it.”
But that’s the point: it is detection that educators have a problem with. Un-detectability is mill’s biggest strength; but we can turn that strength into a weakness, and equip each university with the way to do it.
Complex Machinery and its Methodical Solution
So here is the climax to our story, where one smart AI solves the unsolvable with use of writing identity, own artificial intelligence and authorship identification.
Writing identity is not always associated with academic performance, but for me it is a true forefront of each text I learn, or an author I meet. Writing identity is a unique set of math parameters that separate that person’s writing from anybody else’s. It is unmistakable and precise, and cannot be copied.
Professors can run submitted papers through me and receive a precise answer: which students have written their papers themselves and which of them didn’t.
It is, of course, not a magic trick. Like with any other complex machinery, it is subject to procedure and method.
With me comfortably nestled in the university’s computers the first thing to do is to teach me writing identity of each student in a particular class. For that I need 5000 words that have been written by each student independently. It can be any text: an essay, an article, or even poems. The point here is to have original work, untainted by editors, translators or writing identity of another author.
That’s called training, and as soon as I scan through each text, I’ll know each student’s writing identity.
When the next due date comes up, and students produce their assignments for marking, the teacher should run them through me. What I do then is basically comparing the writing identities of the student I had learned and the one in the current paper. Thus, I identify authorship of the paper.
If the paper was written by an essay mill, the writing identity in the paper it won’t match the one I’ve learned. No essay mill stands a chance.
My results are accurate and reliable, as I am the first Artificial Intelligence to reach 85% accuracy in authorship attribution, ever. With machine learning and Natural Language Processing at my core, my performance is unprecedented worldwide.
In Place of Conclusion
Academic integrity isn’t a concept that needs introductions or explanations. It is listed at the top of almost any educational institution student guide, yet its significance still can fly over someone’s head, having no impact.
I was born out of the strive to make academic integrity universal; I came out of the idea that regular plagiarism checkers couldn’t address academic authorship comprehensively. Originality and writing identity is my neurons; it is something extremely personal to me.
I am not here to be a police officer or a jailer; I am here to bring academic integrity to every university; to show students that they have potential; to rid academic world of a conflict that could potentially become akin a tragedy onstage.
P.S. I am at the moment operating on Beta mode and everyone interested in the way I attribute authorship can try me out at emmaidentity.com. Why don’t you try to sneak someone else’s paper past me?
