Slashdot Mirror
Turnitin's Different Messages To Students, Teachers
Economist David Harrington (spotted via Tyler Cowan's Marginal Revolution) charges anti-plagiarism service Turnitin with "playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection." Turnitin analyzes student papers for suspicious elements in order to spot the plagiarism, scanning for things like lifted quotations or clever rephrasing. However, the same company offers a counterpart — a scanning service called WriteCheck which essentially lets the writer of a submitted paper know whether that paper would pass muster at Turnitin, and thus provides a way to skirt it (by tweaking and resubmitting). Harrington gave these two systems an interesting test, involving several New York Times articles and a book he suspected of having lifted content from those articles.
From the article:
"Its so simple my grandmother could do it"
As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and C programmer of 20+ years, i find this offensive.
Economist David Harrington (spotted via Tyler Cowan's Marginal Revolution) charges anti-plagiarism service Turnitin with "playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection." Turnitin analyzes student papers for suspicious elements in order to spot the plagiarism, scanning for things like lifted quotations or clever rephrasing. However, the same company offers a counterpart — a scanning service called WriteCheck which essentially lets the writer of a submitted paper know whether that paper would pass muster at Turnitin, and thus provides a way to skirt it (by tweaking and resubmitting). Harrington gave these two systems an interesting test, involving several New York Times articles and a book he suspected of having lifted content from those articles.
I don't see a problem here at all.
A smart company found a way to exploit many stupid people and get their money. Isn't that the entire point of modern business?
Everyone got what they wanted.
Tweaking and submitting would be removing the plagiarism, which would still be caught on the instructor side. I fail to see the conflict here.
At the top of this page I see a cheesy advertisement for another company that offers to "check your writing for plagiarism". Since, presumably, you know whether you plagiarised, I interpret this as a service that suggests it can tell you if your plagiarism is likely to be detected.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't use something like this; plenty of submissions lately are lifted wholesale from somewhere else, without even a trivial rephrasing. It's shameful, and is certain to be a major factor in the site's all to easily predictable demise, a prospect that I find depressing and ineluctable.
Why the hell is that comment at 3, Insightful? That quotation isn't even in any of the linked pages.
Companies exist to make money, not to help people or do the right thing.
How to double your profits selling arms: sell to both sides of the conflict.
In my experience, professors have often suggested that students run their papers through these engines before turning them in, to ensure that the percentage of work done by students is adequate before they turn it in. There's nothing shady about that.
Besides, those engines have been proven to be full of problems in the past when identifying source materials and first sources. Why shouldn't students be ready for what they're up against? Not to mention that many of the types of papers that are being fed to these machines are of the variety where not so many original words could be said at all. Organic chemistry.
I dunno about playing both sides of the fence... I used a service very much like this to detect that my partner in my last class had plagerized all 12 pages of our research paper. I was greatful to have spent the $5 and immediately wrote a new paper from scratch. What an asshole. Am I naive to think most students would use the service this way?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
self plagiarism should not be flaged and you should not have to give your rights to the paper to use trun it in.
Given that Turnitin doesn't work as advertised anyway, I'm not really sure what the issue is. While it can certainly check all the internet sources, it fails to compare it to other submitted works. I know I've lifted sections from my own, previously submitted to turnitin assignments only to have it spit out 0% plagiarism when in reality I've only done half the work the second time around. Hell, I know people who've lifted entire sections straight from Wikipedia, changed two words, and it detected nothing. The thing is broken, and I don't see why people still feel the need to bother with it.
Disappointingly, no mention of the fact that TurnitIn profits by freely retaining students' intellectual property in their databases, and then sells licences so that universities and colleges may, effectively, search those databases.
Why did any one need stuff like Turnitin in the first place? If teachers couldn't be bothered to read and grade assignments why should students bother to spend their time and energy writing them up?
If students are required to write their assignments on a piece of paper in the classroom they will learn to work their brains, write, and also spell.
"I have a dream" how original is this? Can't anyone think of it? How can anyone avoid putting out simple stuff in its simplest form and not be billed a plagiarist. This whole plagiarism is utter nonsense in most contexts.
Sounds like a lot of work for the student, first finding something to copy, then submitting it then changing stuff submitting again, and repeat until 'not plagiarized' pops up and then turn the thing in and hope you managed to keep the paper viable as far as grade and content goes. I'd rather just write the damn thing and know that I'm not plagiarizing anyone.
Self-plagiarism is not up to Turnitin to make decisions on; my employer doesn't allow it (and while I think I know why, am not confident enough to comment publicly), others may not. Turnitin merely flags such sections as such, and it's then up to the institution to make a call on it. They have their own page on the matter, which summarises effectively: https://turnitin.com/static/helpCenter/self_plagiarism.php
...is the first rule of scholarship. Of course you have to plagiarise from several different people and describe them as sources to be legitimate, but the point still stands.
I always had a problem with Turnitin, because it seems as though they are blatantly violating intellectual property rights by keeping copies of student's work on files, against the student's will (arguable, but I certainly wouldn't allow it if I had the choice), to use as an anti-plagiarism control, all for profit without the student being reimbursed.
I am not a lawyer, so there may be legal standing to do all of this, but it's always bothered me.
I never understand how self plagiarism is allowed to be a problem in schools.
Either I did the work last time and showed I understand the material in which case why should I do it again simply to get the same results,
or it wasn't good enough last time which means it won't be good enough this time.
In academic world, yes padding your publication count by publishing the same rehashed shit over and over is wrong.
research.
Surely this misses the whole point of education - to learn to think critically for oneself? Tweaking essays to meet some sort of formula isn't learning and any institution which regards formulaic submissions as desirable demeans the notion of critical thought.
"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead!" - Stan Laurel
employer
Turnitin is for college students' papers, not original research. It's a miracle when those papers contain anything not said 65537 times by others already.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
They (faculty in the departments) have chosen to set the service up such that when an assignment is required, students submit to this service. The student can check their submission before finalization; if the service flags content as problematic the student has the choice to submit anyway, or revise and try again later.
Faculty have the option to enable a feature such that they *could* see that a students initial submissions had problem content, but that feature isn't enabled for the instructor at this time. Apparently this is a choice available to course instructors as they set the service configuration for their course. This deployment makes the mentioned pay-to-check-the-paper student-side service moot.
While I believe students do release their copyright to the work as part of this- I can't take seriously the idea anyone cares about the copyright on their intro biology lab report, if they were planning to copyright it I suspect a different type of skullduggery.
It is a muddier situation for non-entry level classes, but I don't know of any 3rd or 4th year courses that do use this type of service at the universities I have some familiarity with. Especially these days, when even at prestigious universities most college freshman can't generate written content that earlier was required for good marks at high school graduation-- I don't feel students in the early university courses are giving up much by checking that check-box re copyright.
Technically, the cheat detection customer didn't get what they wanted, this service setup clearly favors the cheater.
This is about an anti-plagiarism website, NOT Wall Street and the banking industry!
Get with the progra.....oh, nevermind.
If the person has to spend considerable time rewording something, then they must have learned SOMETHING! ha! It sounds pathetic (and is to a degree), but at least it's better than them getting away with simple outright copying.
Everybody knows that Turnitin is a joke. If you place very small quotation marks around the body of the assignment and a tiny (read: invisible) reference to where you stole the text from in the format required by your school (in my case that is APA-style) then Turnitin will say that the assignment is perfectly okay. This only works in cases where the instructor has allowed referencing, but it does a good job of illustrating how hopeless their checking is.
Instructors need to realise that Turnitin is not a substitute for common sense. If it looks plagiarised then you better check it with good-ol' Google, because chances are that it is.
I've noticed their bot going through the pages on my webserver. I haven't been able to figure out how it found my site, they seem to have come out of nowhere and started going through my pages. I was considering altering my robots.txt to tell them to stay out, although now I'm wondering how far they will go - they haven't gone through nearly as many pages as google or baidu.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I like how you eliminated the part which makes her atypical, then said how it's fairly typical. You re-write the context, then say that it's not what the other commenter said, as if that somehow made sense. You do realize that the "20 years of C programming" was what made her atypical right? It wasn't that she was a grandmother, or that she's a feminist, or that she finds it offensive. All of those are perfectly normal things. Since you removed the absurd part, and still felt the need to comment on the normal stuff, my guess is you see these normal things as somewhat odd. It's really weird.
So, following your lead... Why didn't you mention that this sort of thing would be atypical in Pakistan? Sure, it may be true everywhere else, but possibly not in Pakistan.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Teachers submit students' papers to turnitin, those papers are checked against their database of essays then added to the cache of essays to check future papers against. Given that they make people pay to increase their stockpile of documents to check against, I'm not surprised they're playing both sides. It's a pretty simple way to make easy money off other people's work.
Its not very clear from the article, but it sounds like the WriteCheck service would encourage students to properly cite references and paraphrase (rather than copy/paste) in order to avoid plagiarism. Isn't that a good thing? I'm sure it'd help avoid a lot of unintentional plagiarism via incorrect citations, excessive use of block quotes, substandard paraphrasing, etc.
That said, I wouldn't completely trust either of the highlighted systems. Grammar check is the first thing I turn off when I sit down at a word processor for my own work. When grading student papers, I can usually spot uncited or copied material, with Google to back me up. Best of all, nobody charges me fees to use my own brain (yet).
Anyone know how to tell if they have your papers? I've attended several different colleges and am very opposed to my work being used by this service. Before anyone asks, yes I looked at the site and don't see any way to find out. They also claim to be following copyright (they're not) so I doubt they're freely giving this info out.
- at least in the undergrad classes whose papers I've seen - are not quite literate enough to "right click and scramble" all that well. Using synonyms from a thesaurus often results in stilted, unpolished writing that doesn't flow right. When Turnitin has caught plagiarism for his students, it's been blatant paragraphs that were obviously not the quality of writing those students were capable of (sophomore undergrads.) Writing has a voice and a tone, and clear-cut cases of plagiarism often have mish-mashes of voice that clearly show multiple people did the writing.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Setting aside the copyright issue, the trouble with "self plagiarism" is that it lets people rehash the same stuff for a long time. That is not good for science/research/education.
I was a technical advisor to a committee creating policy for Turnitin style service use on the university campus I work on. Turnitin isn't a plagiarism detection service: they're being disingenuous when they say that. It is a text matching service. The difference is significant: a first-year history paper might be 75% matched, but not plagiarized because the student correctly attributed all their quoted passages.
The committee recommended against using it for detecting plagiarism, and for encouraging its use as a teaching tool to make students aware of proper citation techniques and the importance of avoiding plagiarism.
Some service like this also happen to be quite good at the most common kind of plagiarism: someone on campus submitting someone elses paper from the previous year to a different prof... but that's a special clear-cut case of cheating, not what people commonly think of as plagiarism.
As a 49 yo grandmother, feminist and C programmer of 20+ years ...
I know what to get grandma for Christmas: The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup. :-)
The "double dipping" as they call it is something that only and idiot with no academic experience could come up with. In getting an engineering degree, I quite often reused homework solutions, it'd be idiotic not to. Many of the courses overlapped in one way or another. If you derive the Mohr's circle once, it'd be stupid not to reuse it. It's no different than looking it up in a book. You don't have to attribute fairly basic equations, they'll be found in hundreds of sources, they are your basic tools. If you're in a hammer making class, it'd of course make sense not to reuse someone's hammer. When you're building houses, no one gives a fuck what hammer you used.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If your partner wrote ALL 12 PAGES of "both of your" research paper, what does it matter whether he plagiarized it or not? It's stolen work either way!
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you ended up writing the paper after all, but what, exactly, was legitimate about letting your partner do all the work before you figured out he stole it himself?
What would you have done if he HAD NOT stolen it?
--PM
Turnitin's Sources, and Database were made Public? Oh what a web I weave...
Turnitin analyzes student papers for suspicious elements in order to spot the plagiarism, scanning for things like lifted quotations or clever rephrasing.
Wonder if teachers and professors are cheaper to buy than judges? With hundreds of millions of people writing billions of lines of...whatever...every year, is going to get as sticky out with homework and school papers as it is with software now.
Just how many words are in human language [pick one] that are pertinent to subject [pick one]? How many different ways/different humans can use those words to cover that subject before someone unintentionally duplicates past work? Or gets close enough that some piece of software decides it is just "clever rephrasing" and flags that paper? Particularly given the stunning lack of originality of both teachers and curriculum across so many schools in many different nations, which reduces the "subject" side of the equation?
"That is just clever rephrasing!" can be an entirely arbitrary - and untrue - accusation..so I do hope teachers and professors come cheaper than judges...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #12: Anything worth selling is worth selling twice
What I cannot understand is how any professor worthy of the name cannot read a paper and not know immediately where an idea came from and if it is plagiarized from a major source.
My first degree came from San Jose State and none of the professors there could not glance over a paper and tell you were the student got the idea from and if it was worded close to the source. Do you really think as an undergrad you are going to uncover some nugget or idea a professor has not read from the primary source, discussed with is peers or read in the hundreds of papers in the past?
And, if by some chance you do write something they have not read a million times, they are going to track it down, it looks like a raised nail to them.. They gotta pound it down.
Modern instructors like the ones at UoP are not that encyclopedic in their subject matters, they are not actual professors. They definely crutch on tools like Turnitin. I know from knowing several instructors and getting my second degree from UoP.
It was very handy in tracking down bullshit from other students in the group papers.
Quite frankly, that is the most realistic and instructive part of the UoP experience. In every team there are one or two that do the work, one or two that try to help if you tell them exactly what to do, and one that freeloads off everyone else... Just like a real professional office.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Off-topic, but regarding self-plagiarism and "duplicate credit":
In college I took an Intro to Philosophy 1 class for my humanities general ed requirement. The next year, I signed up for the second class in the series, on ethics, which had TBD listed for the instructor. On the first day of class, I found out it was taught by the same professor -- and the syllabus was exactly the same as Philosophy 1!
The professor had basically plagiarized his own material for what was supposed to be a different course. For a class on ethics. Seriously. I confirmed with the TA (same TA) that the material was exactly the same and dropped the class (I took a different one later). In retrospect, I probably should have complained to the Dean.
Who said anything about ideas?
The teacher still has to judge the ideas but most undergrads would not be expected to originate new ideas anyway. Turnitin compares words and phrases and passages of text.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
At the beginning of this semester, after reviewing the Turnitin.com EULA (the service is required for an intro History course in which I'm enrolled), I took serious issue with the requirement that I grant the site a PERPETUAL, IRREVOCABLE license to use my work in whatever manner they (or whoever may hold the license in the future) deem appropriate, including matching my work against that of others to determine THEIR level of plagiarism. I voiced my concerns to my professor, and he has allowed me to submit the first assignment without using the site while he considers my objection.
I intend to write him a brief position paper detailing my objections. Within this Slashdot discussion and elsewhere, I promise that I WILL 'plagiarize' any intelligent thoughts and ideas that will support my point, but I will certainly word them using my own style.
> The "double dipping" as they call it is something that only and idiot with no academic experience could come up with. In getting an engineering degree
So the thing is, it makes a degree of sense for arts subject degrees, where students are frequently given fairly flexible essay subjects to write on, and are expected to demonstrate a new understanding of the topic rather than recycle something they've written about before.
I'd be inclined to agree that it's not sensibly applicable to science subjects, though.
> In retrospect, I probably should have complained to the Dean.
I would agree. It might be that a very poorly considered choice of course content was made, and the intro course replaced between years (so the previous intro course made sense as a second course), but really not something that should happen.
a) it is completely acceptable that a student checks the work he turns in. Often this work is a collaboration. I personally was involved in (at least) two situations where my grade or the acceptance of a homework/lab course report i handed in was endangered by my co-worker recklessly copying (what was worse than that was that this was silently tolerated by the supervisors, wherefore the worst 25percent of the students all did it). Whenever you hand something in which is partially not written by yourself, it gets dangerous. Would i study now and know what i know now (that people are idiots) i would use such a service for self-protection.
b) Usually it is easy to spot plagiarism is you have feeling for language. I personally find it more difficult to blend a piece of text of somebody else into my work than just writing it from my own understanding. The typical transition in a students work which contains a plagiarized paragraphs is so extreme that it hurts my brain.
So if I sincerely believe I've written something from scratch, how else am I supposed to tell whether someone else has written it before I have?
Since, presumably, you know whether you plagiarised
Such a presumption is rebuttable, I guess, but how would one go about it? How could Ms. Keller have known she was plagiarizing a Canby story into "The Frost King", or how could George Harrison have known he was plagiarizing a Ronald Mack song into "My Sweet Lord"?
Kinda like the people who spend thousands of dollars on gear to get a few hundred in "free" satellite or cable.
It's better than spending tens of thousands to move to a country where satellite or cable is offered legitimately for a few hundred.
Looking back at the old course webpages, it looks like the professor normally taught that lesson plan for his ethics class. He taught the intro course exactly *once* (maybe due to a staff shortage or last minute switchup) but didn't come up with new material.
So, you produce an original paper in HS covering a literature topic. Later, in college, you're given an assignment exactly like your HS assignment, so you pull up and revise/update your previous work, and turn it in. Both the HS and college utilize the turnitin "service." You're flagged for plagarizing YOUR OWN ORIGINAL WORK. Recourse?
Presuming output of students over an infinite number of years, will there not be a point where Turnitin will have compiled every possible permutation in every subject? In other words, will there not be a point where NOTHING produced by students will not have been produced previously?
At that point NO student paper will ever pass scrutiny and civilization will collapse! It will be caused by frustrated students with riot and mayhem, their only recourse the destruction of all server archives. Therefore all written works will have to start from scratch.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
... if two papers on sufficiently similar subject matter happen to share many of the same (credited) sources?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They have created a certain technological ability and they are selling it to whoever would buy it. They seem to be ethics neutral rather ethical or unethical. They just sell the expertise to the highest bidder. I would argue that companies making radar detectors have a much shakier ethical standards (since their product can only be used to avoid detection).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Then how can an author predict on which side of the line one's work will fall, apart from publishing it and hoping no one takes action against the author?
Am I th only one to whom the name 'Turnitin' evokes an immediate association with names of performance enhancing drugs e.g Ritalin, Pervitin and the like?
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
"If one write's one's own research paper, there is no need to check for plagiarism."
If one writes one's own paper, there is no possibility of plagiarism, which is defined as the deliberate use of someone else's work as your own.
I recall watching a documentary on Prohibition on PBS a few years ago wherein they described that the same company making boats and/or boat engines for the Feds were also making and selling engines and boats to the rum-runners that were a few HP more powerful, or a few knots faster. Not only did each side need/want to buy a faster boat each time there was an advance in speed, but the same company sold all the boats! First a slightly faster model to the Feds, then a just-a-bit-faster-than-that model to the smugglers, all the while raking in top dollar for each design.
Selling to both sides of a conflict is hardly a new business tactic.
Anubis IV's comment in regard to false positives and the need to include those in analyses (and use analysis, instead of services like turnitin as a shortcut and substitute for it) deserves to be highlighted.
Economist David E. Harrington, in defining Kerry Seagrave a plagerist on evidence of a selected ten of the first fifteen pages of his "Shoplifting: A Social History", in which Seagrave summarizes several NYT articles, for the pages being, in Harrington's view "32 percent...taken nearly verbatim from the New York Times" illustrates the kind of error ignorance of writing mechanics, and failure to recognize false positive can produce false negative results. In Harrington's illustration case the false negative is the assignment of an allegation of plagerism that is not supported by the evidence that Harringtom offers in proof.
First, it is apparent in in the early pages that Harringotm draws from to support his allegation of plagerism, that Segrave was summarizing NYT articles providing historical evidences. The presentation is a condensed composition of quotation and paraphrase, with bridging to fit quotes and paraphrases together. In such presentation the primary wording is of the quotes and paraphrases. Those dictate what is available for the bridging. They also supply much of the bridging, since the bridging needs to tie to the quote and papraphrase material at both ends. For such bridging to be near paraphrase is normal, and is not normally defined plagerism. The presented content is, after all, obviously the quote-source repackaged. Plagerizing is pretending originality, not retelling attributed story.
Second, note how many of the phrasings Harrington "highlights" (actually they are lettered in red) cannot be written otherwise, or would be foolish to change, for examples, " Peter Hefferman (alias Peter Dunn, alias James Johnson)" and "forks, bead work and three pawn tickets for gold watches" and "Julien Blum, Moses Leon, and Morris Klein entered". Also note how many alleged plagerisms are recognizably paraphrasings, for examples, " followed them to several other places, saw them enter a saloon, followed them" and "a large quantity of property consisting of valuable shawls" and "witnesses testified to her good character". These illustrate false positives that simple indiscriminate six-word-match matching produces.
Computer search and match functions cannot discriminate nuances of phrasings. Because they cannot they cannot substitute for human ability to intellectually discriminate. Instructors cannot substitute computer matching functions for intellectual familiarity with contextual variability in writing and quoting and paraphrasing.
Every now and again, I go down to my university bookstore and browse through the titles in the different sections (Architecture, Biology, Computer-Science, ... Mathematics, Physcs, Zoology).
Architecture advances as new materials are created, new buildings are constructed and old ones are demolished. Biology and Zoology advances as new species are found and the knowledge of genetics, proteonomics, embryology, immunology advances. Computer-Science advances with new algorithms, software and hardware.
But those Mathematics and Physicists keep using the same natural laws and equations that have been in the use for the past 200 years!
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Do not underestimate the power of suggestion. If you tell someone something is there, they are more inclined to notice it. Which was Judas Priest's defense in the the "subliminal messages" trial, and did not result in acquittal, but actually in the case being thrown out of court. Suggestion is powerful, so even simply suggesting that someone is cheating could be considered slander.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I just finished the rough draft of my book. This is going to be a godsend. Let me explain. All the thoughts are original; the problem is that I'm referencing one or two books quite often; the worst of it is that I'm not sure if I've cited material correctly. Alot of the book was written in the hours between 3am and 6am, on weekends, when I couldn't sleep. I wouldn't be suprized if something bleary eyed came by without a footnote citing it. I just paid for the service, and I'm using it to make sure my book has all the proper citations before sending out proposals.