How FeatureBench Prevents Plagarism
Academic integrity is important to every course. FeatureBench takes this seriously and provides tools for teachers to identify infractions. Our Solidworks worker extracts a great deal of data from the Solidworks documents submitted beyond the screenshot and mass properties required for our core product.
Additional data we consider from documents includes:
- Feature Tree Small parts will often have identical feature trees, but the part’s design intent tends to diverge as the part’s complexity increases.
- Material Configuration Often, assignments ask students to configure a material, including setting a color. The specifics of these materials tends to vary, which makes it a good resource for difference checking
- Part Metadata including the exact file size, timestamp of the most recent save, and more
- Windows Metadata* included with the SLDPRT file including a submitter’s Windows username and version
- FeatureBench Metadata* including submission times, locations, and device information.
- And over 30 other datapoints.
We constantly scan the parts submitted to FeatureBench for cases of academic integrity violations. If we find something, we will quietly flag it internally and an email will be sent to the instructor with a link to a report. The report will include all infringing students and submissions and original SLDPRT files. The instructor can reach out to us for help in their investigation and we will provide additional metadata.
We scan against all submissions in our records that are affiliated with the same teacher. This means we can identify plagarism across different sections (and even different semesters/years). We will not scan the entire database of records for submissions. This is in a goal to keep different courses (and schools) seperate and prevent them from being involved with each other.
Note: Except for rare cases, we will not provide a full report of all metadata. Keeping the list of exactly what metadata we use to track plagarism and how we use them is important to keeping the feature functional and preventing workarounds.
If you suspect plagarism
If you suspect plagarism and we have not flagged it, please reach out using the following:
- Where possible, send the email from the same email address affiliated with your FeatureBench teacher account
- Provide the students’ names exactly as they appear in the FeatureBench roster. If the names do not match our records, we will be unable to provide any information on basis of protecting student privacy.
- Provide offending assignment names if applicable
- Any other context you can provide to help us build your report
* Barring truly exceptional situations (typically requiring legal requests or students facing severe consequences) these data points will not be shared. A synopsis will appear in standard reports, but the actual data values are kept private. This is for the protection of the students’ privacy, especially since the similarity of this data is a useful whistle, but the actual content is rarely important. If you believe this information is required for your case, reach out and we will evaluate on a case-by-case basis.