| Description |
The Odevzdej.cz project (http://odevzdej.cz/) came into existence as a reaction to teachers' demand for a system similar to the National Registry of Theses and plagiarism-tracing Theses.cz (http://theses.cz/ ), i.e. the one capable of detecting instances of plagiarism in seminar papers, essays, and other works. That is, at some schools (e.g. those teaching economics or humanities), seminar papers represent an indispensable part of students' studies. This is the reason why the project of Odevzdej.cz, apart from striving to prevent plagiarism in seminar papers, essays, etc., also aims to eliminate the negative effect of the servers collecting these works and enabling students to copy them. Besides, the project sets out to educate students in how to exploit the information sources they use when writing their papers since the students often do not realize they are plagiarizing other people's works by not referencing them correctly. Odevzdej.cz (joined by ten Czech state-owned universities under the auspices of a project funded by the Czech Ministry of Education) was created by its main coordinator, Masaryk University, under the project leadership of the associate professor Michal Brandejs (working at the Faculty of Informatics). It was put into its testing phase on June 24, 2009. Nowadays, Odevzdej.cz enables teachers to launch the so-called Homework Vaults, into which students, following their teachers' instructions, can upload their papers. Subsequently, using the system, the teachers can check these for plagiarism by conducting similarity searches across more than 1,300,000 documents stored in the Odevzdej.cz, Theses.cz and Wikipedia databases as well as other locations. The teachers can also assess their students' papers directly in the system and provide the students with comments related to these. Apart from working on the automatic batch upload application capable of uploading documents (theses, seminar papers, essays, etc.) from the local data pools of the schools involved in the project into a centralized database, the development team of the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, also look into ways of including in the similarity searches the documents stored on the Internet - a feature that would make the fight against plagiarism initiated by the universities yet more effective.
|