[majormajor]

Plagiarism detection tech seems like a solving-the-wrong-problem attempt to address a symptom of how we're trying to mass-produce education to save money.

If we actually want people to learn, plagiarism detection isn't the problem, it's the industrial factory approach in the first place. Get rid of that, and instructors can know and talk with their students well enough to tell what they actually know and understand instead of having to rely on artifacts that can be faked.

But we'd have to be spending more money in the first place, vs spending money on other things (like cops?!).

[austenallred]

I don't agree with this at all. Assessment is completely necessary to understand where a student is at, and plagiarism renders assessment ineffective.

[reading-at-work]

I think the point of the person you're replying to is that there are other methods of assessment which would render plagiarism ineffective - such as in-person presentations and conversations. But, teachers don't have the time and resources to do that with all of their students.

Effective writing is an important skill, so I don't think in-person conversations would replace papers, but from a conversation with a student who plagiarized their paper you could probably tell that they didn't really understand what they "wrote."

[majormajor]

Industrial mass-produced "assessment" is only necessary in a mostly-anonymous, un-personal system. If you have time to actually talk to a student, you can figure out pretty quickly how well they understand something.

I think of it like stack overflow. If someone borrows ideas and code from there for a code review, I'm fine with that, as long as they understand how the system is doing. Being able to do research and find information is a useful skill! But only if it's applied correctly, with understanding. So I'm going to probe on that. And it might be blindingly obvious to me that they didn't understand what they were doing, or why the pasted code isn't appropriate. And I don't need a "stack overflow detector" to see that.

[ses1984]

Yes, if we had unlimited resources and could give each student an individualized exam, oral and written under supervision, then plagiarism detection of tech wouldn't be necessary, but if you're trying to stretch a budget...

[HarryHirsch]

In the past we solved that by the instructor discussing the material with the students; it would quickly become apparent who knew something and who didn't. Unfortunately classes have become too big for that.

[542458]

That injects a ton of bias into your marking though. Under that method, shy students and students with poor verbal skills (for example, ESL) don't stand a chance. I have seen excellent work come out of students that you could barely talk about the material, but could produce excellent assignments (this is in a domain where plagiarism would be very easy to detect, so I'm very confident it's actually their work).

[majormajor]

It's better for shy students or students with poor verbal skills to work on that in an academic environment than to be dropped into a work environment where those things are just as important without their education ever bothering to help them with it.

"Interpersonal skills are optional" is not a good side effect of our current educational system!