Review the Documents

Wikipedia article on "Elephants in Thailand" Student-submitted essay on "Elephants in Thailand"

The elephant has been a contributor to Thai society and its icon for many centuries. The elephant has had a considerable impact on Thai culture. The Thai elephant is the official national animal of Thailand. The elephant found in Thailand is the Indian elephant, a subspecies of the Asian elephant.

The elephant is a contributor to Thai society. It has been an icon of Thai life for many centuries. The elephant, which it is possible to see found in every part of Thailand, is the Indian elephant, which is a subspecies of the Asian elephant. The Thai elephant has a considerable impact on culture. The elephant is the official national animal of Thailand.

1 Do you think the student who submitted this essay on Elephants in Thailand committed plagiarism? Circle one: Yes No

Detect Identicality

Open the Plagiarism Detection Starter File and click "Run".

  • The two paragraphs above are defined in the starter file as wiki-article and student-essay, respectively.

  • The file also defines a function simple-equality, which takes in two Strings and produces a Boolean: true indicates that there is a match; false indicates that there is not a match.

2 Record if the output is true or false for each line of code:

simple-equality("hello", "goodbye") simple-equality("hello", "HELLO") simple-equality("hello", "helo") simple-equality("hello,", " Hello.")

3 How does simple-equality deal with punctuation, capitalization, and spaces?

4 Compare the essays using simple-equality(student-essay, wiki-article). What does the program return?

Building a Better Plagiarism Detector

Yara and Xola agree that there has to be a way to measure the similarity of the essays. They each propose a different solution.

Yara: I made a list of the four most unusual and unique words in each essay. Then I compared the lists. Because the two lists of unusual words are identical (elephant, Thai, Indian, and Asian), I decided that the student plagiarized!

Xola: I figured out the four most common words in each essay. In the wiki-article, they are: "the" (7), "elephant" (6), "Thai" (3), and "a" (3). In the student essay, they are: "the" (7), "elephant" (6), "is" (5), and "of" (4). Because the most common words are not the same, I don’t think the student plagiarized.

5 What do you like about Yara’s method? What are its shortcomings?

6 What do you like about Xola’s method? What are its shortcomings?

7 Come up with your own method! What is a different way to measure the similarity between the two essays?

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