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.

Comments

How to double your profits selling arms:

[Duradin]

How to double your profits selling arms: sell to both sides of the conflict.

Re:Tweaking and submitting

[PCM2]

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.