Automatic paraphrasing tools: an unexpected consequence of addressing student plagiarism and the impact of COVID in distance education settings
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Text matching tools employed to detect plagiarism are widely used in universities, but their availability may have pushed students to find ways to evade detection. One such method is the use of automatic paraphrasing software, where assignments can be rewritten with little effort required by students. This paper uses the search engine analytics methodology with data from SEMrush and Google Trends to estimate the level of interest in online automatic paraphrasing tools, focusing on the period 2016 to 2020 and the four countries: the USA, UK, Canada and Australia. The results show a concerning trend, with the number of searches for such tools growing during the period, especially during COVID-19, and notable increases observed during the months where assessment periods take place in universities. The method employed in this study opens up a new avenue of analysis to enrich and supplement the existing knowledge in the field of academic integrity research. The data obtained demonstrates that faculty should be alert for student use of automatic paraphrasing tools and that academic integrity interventions need to be in place across the sector to address this problem.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Research integrity Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | medium |
| gpt | Research integrity Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | medium |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it