HEC strives to track plagiarism

NUST designs software to track the infamous cut-paste approach.

ISLAMABAD: Sixty public sector universities can now catch out their students with a software that tracks plagiarism.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) is organising training in Turnitin, the software developed by the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST). One training session was held on Tuesday at NUST for its own faculty, chaired by Pro-Rector Dr Asif Raza.

Turnitin helps students and instructors review matches between the submitted work and internet sources. The software can scan citations, quotations, and bibliographic material to determine an overall similarity percentage.

It will be used to check papers, theses and reports among other documents. Right now, many universities use Learning Management System (LMS) to keep track of academic activity. Turnitin can be integrated with these LMS systems to save time and effort. Moodle is an Open Source LMS, developed initially at Curtin University, Australia, to automate the administration, documentation, tracking, and reporting of training events. LMS provides teachers and students an online platform to extend learning outside the classroom.

HEC Deputy Director (Quality Assurance) Muneer Ahmed demonstrated three components of Turnitin i.e. Originality Check, Peer Mark and Grade Mark. During 2009, almost 45,000 documents were checked and only 18,000 were found to be within the acceptable range, which proves that the culture of cutting and pasting from the internet and other sources still exists.

The HEC is encouraging institutions to use Turnitin to check assignments, papers and reports. Training and continuous interaction with students and scholars will help develop a culture of quality research.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2011.