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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.
How to double your profits selling arms: sell to both sides of the conflict.
Tweaking and submitting would be removing the plagiarism, which would still be caught on the instructor side. I fail to see the conflict here.
But it doesn't have to be verbatim to be plagiarism. Changing a few words here and there still isn't the same as doing the research and writing the paper yourself. A paper is supposed to be a demonstration of what you know and how well you can articulate it. A paper that you swiped and then tweaked to pass a plagiarism review proves only that you know how to be a crook.
Breakfast served all day!
Just because your mommy was 15 when she had you doesn't mean everyone else's was, Junior.
Try playing with the math a little more and with yourself a litle less, eh:
21 (grandma's age when she had the daughter) + 21 (daughter's age when she had the grandchild) + 7 (grandchild's age) = 49.
Do you think 21 is too young for a woman to have her first child?
How about 31?
And how old will you be when you grow up enough not to feel threatened by individuals who are capable of bearing a child *and* having a successful career?
Regards,
Lucky (male) partner of a fabulous lady engineer.