Promoting Integrity in Assignments:
Get a Writing Sample
By collecting a writing sample from students earlier in the semester, we can practice stylometry later in the semester if we suspect plagiarism. Stylometry is the study of an author's style that often focuses on linguistic considerations. The science of stylometry made news during July 2013 when Patrick Juola identified J.K. Rowling as the author of The Cuckoo's Calling which she had published under the name Robert Galbraith.
Stylometry identified Rowling as Galbraith because of similarity in style "using four variables: word-length distribution; the use of common words like "the" and "of"; recurring-word pairings; and the distribution of "character 4-grams," or groups of four adjacent characters, words, or parts of words." In a similar way, stylometry allows a professor to identify suspected plagiarism when there is not a similarity between the writing sample and the work submitted later in the semester by the same student.
Students are surprised when I tell them that faculty members can often identify plagiarism because the style of a paper is not consistent. Because of stylometry, mosaic plagiarism — one of the types of plagiarism discussed in "Three Common Types of 'Accidental' Plagiarism" — is actually fairly easy to identify.
