Paraphrasing is one of the key skills that we expect students to use to show they have understood information they have read, and can put it into their own words while respecting the intellectual property of the original author. To that end, students who do not paraphrase, but copy work word-for-word, are often considered to be engaged in academic misconduct.
Typically, these cases may be spotted using text-matching software systems such as Turnitin that academics use to help identify academic misconduct. However, in our article we discuss how Automated Paraphrasing Tools are making it harder for existing systems and tools to identify and address plagiarism, and are threatening academic integrity throughout Higher Education.
As enrolment in higher education programs expands, the small percentage of students who might seek to gain this unfair advantage grows as well. APTs are therefore a real threat to our current systems of higher education.
If students are trained on these tools in pre-university language programmes, then move into university studies, it’s understandable that they would look to use these tools again. That’s why we believe that education is one of the most important tools to resolve academic integrity issues in the use of APTs, and also more broadly.