Plagiarism In The Philippines

INTRODUCTION

Bowker (2007) defines academic writing as a special genre of composition that follows a set of rules in structure, citation, punctuation, and grammar and focuses on abstract topics. It has been an important component of college curriculum. In fact, in the Philippines, finishing at least one writing course is a prerequisite to graduation. According to the Philippine Commission on Higher Education, aside from courses explicit to a certain discipline, General Education (GE) courses should include writing, advanced reading, and research (Pazzibugan, 2013). In the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), ENG2 (College Writing in English) is a required course as part of GE in every degree program’s curriculum. Other courses

Students continue committing academic dishonesty because they think their teachers would not use the internet to verify their work (2007). Nowadays, when almost every student has access to the web, there is no wonder why teachers use PDS. For instance, schools buy license to use Turnitin, an online PDS created by the American company iParadigms, LCC.

After comparing eleven commercial PDS for Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee, Scaife (2007) came up with the following classifications of electronic plagiarism detection based on the mechanism of checking plagiarism: 1) PDS that verifies against major Internet search engines, 2) PDS that compares within a batch of documents, 3) PDS that are educational products that offers compilation of student submission, and 4) PDS that are non standard products. In addition, the evaluation result shows that Turnitin, which uses a combination of the first three PDS classifications, is the most trusted

However, no similar study has been done in the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Although the instructors have been using free online plagiarism checker to verify students’ work using the internet, no database system is created for and no software is used in comparing the academic paper with the old submitted ones to the Department of Humanities. Thus, the proposed study intends to pioneer the development of an anti-plagiarism database system for the said department of the university.

OBJECTIVES

1.2. General Objectives of the Study Generally, the study intends to develop an anti-plagiarism database system for writing courses under the Department of Humanities (DHUM), College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB).

1.3. Specific Objectives

Specifically, the research aims to accomplish the following:

1. Design the structure of the database to be used in the system;

2. Implement the interface and back end component of the system;

3. Implement system features such as add, view, edit, delete, sort, and search desired information from the database and check plagiarism feature.

1.4. Scope and Limitation

The study will be limited to plagiarism detection using research topic searching, string matching, and citation checking. The database will only contain the softcopies of paper from writing courses of the above-mentioned department