Turnitin vs. Graderworks

by: Anthony Garland
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Plagiarism can take on a broad range of forms. In an engineering class, the embodiment of plagiarism looks different than in an English class. Therefore the tools needed to catch plagiarism in a SOLIDWORKS class will be different than traditional academic plagiarism catching tools like Turnitin. SOLIDWORKS professors assign homework that fits into five different categories and what exactly constitutes plagiarism varies based on the assignment type. A detailed analysis of how Graderworks is used for each of these kinds of assignments can be found in the article, "ROI of Graderworks." 

Since a SOLIDWORKS class requires turning in digital files, the plagiarism checking must be customized for the SOLIDWORKS class. Graderworks detects plagiarism by checking SOLIDWORKS file meta-data rather than semantic text search like TurnitIn. 

After running Graderworks, the analysis.csv file contains a list of files that may be plagiarised and identifies why the file was flagged as potential plagiarism The four checks are:

1. Inconsistent “saved by” name. If one student submits several files and the last “saved by” name is not the same for all the files.
2. Duplicate “saved by” name. If two different students submit files with the same “saved by” name.
3. Duplicate “creation date” for different users. It is unlikely (but not impossible) for two students to submit a file that was created at exactly the same day, hour, minute, and second.
4. Creation date is less than two standard deviations from the average. Files that are old may be from the internet or a previous semester.

Graderworks identified several potential instances of plagiarism.

What is next?

1. Make an expert judgement if the instance is reasonable. For example, if students use their own parts and parts from the SOLIDWORKS toolbox to make an assembly, then the parts from the toolbox will be identified as potential instances of plagiarism. 
2. Export each file feature information and check for plagiarism. 
   1. Copy the file path of each file and paste it into the specific files given textbox. 
   2. Configure Graderworks to export the feature data. 
   3. Run Graderworks
   4. Analyze output.csv file to determine the creator of each feature. This feature analysis will easily allow you to identify if a file was shared. 

You can download an example output.csv file here. You can decide for yourself if the two files are plagiarised. 

In my experience teaching SOLIDWORKS and using Graderworks, about 3% of undergrad students will submit a plagiarised file during a semester. Unfortunately, since, I teach a large class, it is not a question of "if a few students will submit plagiarised files" but rather "how will we handle the situation when it happens".