Is there any way to do this without access to the full resources of the Langley Cryptography Unit?
I’'d like to be able to nail students strongly suspected of faking and/or copying the results of an environmental remote sensing survey, exported from the application i-Tree Canopy as a .csv file.
I missed a trick in not requiring the submission of the native application file, and not putting some kind of “secret signature” on my example .csv file.
Probably too late to fix it this time around, but I’d be interested in countermeasures for any future projects.
I thought the author shown under security>details in Windows Explorer might help, but it doesn’t seem to be consistently recorded/displayed.
I don’t quite understand the scenario, but there’s typically no way to determine if someone has plagiarized part of a file, ie., cut-n-pasted. The usual method of detection is to simply Google the suspect phrase and see if it turns up in an online publication.
Its a .csv data file, containing land cover classes and associated GPS co-ordinates. Even if a Google search could find such stuff, it won’t be on the Internyet anyway.
I realise that - I was just pointing out there’s only one way to find out if someone’s plagiarized something and that’s to find the source document. Only in very rare instances can you “watermark” something such that it survives a copying process.
I’m not quite sure what it is you suspect them of or how the situation arose. You gave them this text file, and you suspect they’ve copied chunks? What were they supposed to do instead? Why do they have this data set in the first place? A bit more context might help, but IMO the only solution here is to not lead students into temptation, since plagiarism (or making stuff up) is not considered particularly sinful here.
They’re supposed to create their own data set through their own surveys. Instead they’ve used the teacher’s data set in their report production. But he can’t prove it since he didn’t ask for the native data sets to be included in the returned assignment.
That’s what I read. But in that case, surely it’s a simple case of spotting the same figures in the student’s document? I don’t see how they could have submitted any sort of sensible report without including their own raw data. Standard procedure would be, if you can’t actually include the data itself in a scientific paper (because there’s too much of it) you make it available on request, or publish it online for download. They should get used to following this sort of procedure.
I’m still not quite sure I understand the nature of your experiment, but if you observe or suspect a correlation between your data set and theirs, then can you test for statistical significance - ie., how likely is it that that correlation arose by chance? t-test?
What happens when you right click the file, select “properties” and then click the “details” tab. Usually has some metadata about the file or computer or program show up.
Not really an experiment, its an environmental change survey. Land cover classification at 5 different times (me and 4 groups) in an area that has had a big disturbance.
I suspect some of them of falsifying their data, because the results are in some cases unlikely, and because there is a correlation between the unlikely results and the producers being lazy and/or stupid, and/or having a history of cheating in tests.
If the results are faked they need not necessarily be based on my file, though that is a convenient starting point.
I doubt statistics would give forensic grade evidence, and since the data is categorical I’d think you’d need to use…er…non-parametric (?) tests like Chi-square. If I’d had time to introduce stats for this project that’s probably what I would have done. Maybe next time.
I think I’ll probably have to take them at face value, a pity since I know a lot of the students worked quite hard on this and they’ll get graded on the same basis as the lazy fuckers.
I did that a couple more times, once with a suspect (84% mismatch) and once with a non-suspect (93% mismatch) so either faking is general, or there’s something wrong with that (or the survey) procedure.
Anyway, grades have to go in before midnight, so i’ll just have to accept it for now
[quote=“finley, post:8, topic:181187, full:true”] Standard procedure would be, if you can’t actually include the data itself in a scientific paper (because there’s too much of it) you make it available on request, or publish it online for download.
[/quote]
I rather doubt that is actually standard procedure, though of course it should be. Certainly when I worked as a research assistant when I first got here, that was never done for the papers I helped get published, and in some cases I’d suspect the raw data didn’t exist.
If you don’t publish your data, your research is meaningless. The whole point of publishing is so that people can attempt to reproduce your results and/or refute your hypothesis. Proper scientists always make their data freely available somehow (although not necessarily to all and sundry) so that - for example - other people can perform alternative analyses on it.
But yeah, there are plenty of pretend-scientists (like nutritionists) who can get away with just publishing their conclusions and expecting a round of applause. They’re publishing for an audience of other non-scientists, so their little happy-clappy charade works out just fine for all concerned. Mostly, though, scientists who refuse to release their source data have something to hide. Scientific fraud is more widespread than scientists would like to admit.
Doing this again, though for a different survey area. Don’t have any clever tricks to prevent fakery other than requiring submission of the native format project file from i-Tree Canopy. I’ll do some spot checking and try and build credibility and consistency scores into the grading.
This avoids outright accusation of fakery, which should be an automatic fail so would need to be definitively proved, and would reinforce my existing troublemaker image with the authorities…
Last time I gave them soft copies of an example report of a survey I did of siltation and vegetation in the Chernobyl Cooling Pond, and in some cases got it right back as their report, with the title changed, so this time they are only getting paper example copies.