The Minister of Labour and Employment Promotion, Betssy Chavez, is once again in the eye of the storm, but not precisely because of a crisis within the institution she leads, but because of the academic research that gave her a law degree in the Jorge Basadre National University of Tacna. According to a Sunday, the software called Turnitin would have determined that 49% of his work would already exist in other publications. Given this, it is worth asking how reliable is the system used to find the alleged plagiarism.
Turnitin is not a newly created tool. Its first appearance was in 1997 and over time it has been refined and reached various academic institutions to serve as a detector of alleged plagiarism in the research and works presented. In Peru, the name of the software became popular when evidence of plagiarism was found in the thesis of then-presidential candidate César Acuña, leader of the Alliance for Progress party.
This tool is capable of examining various types of files and then issuing a summary that points out the coincidences and similarities with other documents that are part of the database it manages. The software itself is not able to confirm the existence of plagiarism, this task falls to the specialist who will use the report provided to conduct a thorough examination of the work in question.
To determine the percentage of matches found, Turnitin uses colors such as blue which means that there are no matching texts. Green is used when there is a match between a word and 24% of the text, yellow if it is between 25% and 49%, orange between 50% and 74%, and red when between 75% and 100% of the document matches another job. According to Panorama, Minister Chávez's thesis would have coincidences of up to 49%, a figure that would correspond to the color yellow.
Among the features of the software, it highlights its ability to determine matches based on paraphrases; that is, having rewritten a text using similar words. If it is a document in HTML language, the system will also be able to review it as it scans an extensive database that is located in 140 countries.
BETSSY CHAVEZ CASE
“In the specific analysis, complete pages were found pasted and copied from different sources that have not been cited throughout the document. This is gross and badly done plagiarism,” said the researcher at the Universidad Científica del Sur, Percy Mayta, after reviewing the content of the research allegedly written by the congresswoman of Free Peru, Betsy Chavez.
The journalistic report noted that there would be more than twenty pages of his research that would have been verbatim copies of other texts. “(This thesis) would be useless. Definitely not. I can find half of what is being put in other sources. It is as if it were an Azángaro of information”, were the statements of the thesis advisor of the Catholic University, José Tavera.
In her attempt to defend herself against accusations, Betssy Chávez pointed out that “the identity of a thesis is determined based on the contribution obtained from fieldwork, the approach of the problem with its variables and the analysis of the information obtained.” In a statement, he said that what is determined by the software “does not disable or diminish the value of the research work deployed, much less does it turn the thesis into “plagiarism” or “copy”.
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