Also, today, the Crampicle provides a list of 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts. JesseStommel'saccount is #7 on the list. I'm exceptionally unfamiliar with everything Stommel, but his name will always ring a bell because CMers mocked him so prolifically last year--perhaps justifiably so?
Regarding the cheating thing, requiring the submissions to be in hardcopy reduces the effectiveness of the tricks involving Word macros or character substitutions. If manualy typing a few sentences into Google is too low tech or laborious, just pop a paper into the sheet-fed scanner, open it in Acrobat Pro, run the OCR tool, submit to Turnitin, and BAM.
Except that a) Acrobat's OCR sucks and b) Turnitin suffers from both false positives and false negatives. Manually typing in just a few words in Google is the fastest and most effective way to deal with the problem.
It may depend on the subject matter. But I think the takeaway is that we have a variety of tools, and even the simplest are quite good, maybe the best.
Google has natural language capabilities that help in cases of "thesaurus abuse".
Also, today, the Crampicle provides a list of 15 Indispensable Academic Twitter Accounts. Jesse Stommel's account is #7 on the list. I'm exceptionally unfamiliar with everything Stommel, but his name will always ring a bell because CMers mocked him so prolifically last year--perhaps justifiably so?
ReplyDeleteBringing Jesse to CM's attention is my proudest moment. The fact that we still make jokes about "the scholarship that counts" pleases me to no end.
DeleteBen, you are a gift that keeps giving, and so is JS, but for entirely different reasons.
DeleteRegarding the cheating thing, requiring the submissions to be in hardcopy reduces the effectiveness of the tricks involving Word macros or character substitutions. If manualy typing a few sentences into Google is too low tech or laborious, just pop a paper into the sheet-fed scanner, open it in Acrobat Pro, run the OCR tool, submit to Turnitin, and BAM.
ReplyDeleteExcept that a) Acrobat's OCR sucks and b) Turnitin suffers from both false positives and false negatives. Manually typing in just a few words in Google is the fastest and most effective way to deal with the problem.
ReplyDeleteIt may depend on the subject matter. But I think the takeaway is that we have a variety of tools, and even the simplest are quite good, maybe the best.
DeleteGoogle has natural language capabilities that help in cases of "thesaurus abuse".