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.
How to double your profits selling arms: sell to both sides of the conflict.
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.
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.
Really? I never had to write any papers in organic chemistry class. I would have been thankful for one.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
Yes, yes there is. The purpose of an educational assignment is voided if you think of it as a game---the point is to do it and learn from that experience, not just "pass" it. If your professors are encouraging you to do that they are fools, and if you think learning is about achieving an "adequate percentage of work done" you do yourself (and your future employers) no service.
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 the hell is that comment at 3, Insightful? That quotation isn't even in any of the linked pages.
Did you use Turnitin to determine that?
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.
And the bigger the database of pre-existing papers on a limited subject, the more likely that any phrasing will have segments that duplicate a prior work.
Also, the more the same source information is used, again, the more likely for statistical duplication.
I know mathematicians and statisticians have a term for these kinds of things where theoretically there are a mind boggling number of possible results, but due to constraints on both input and output, the actual results tend to be of a rather limited subset.
Think about it, if you are at a high class charity formal dinner, and you want the salt shaker that's on the other side of the table and you can't get it yourself, how are you going to ask for it? Sure there are at least hundreds of ways, but there's only a tiny handful you'll actually use unless you want to be shunned or kicked out for inappropriate speech. Under those circumstances what if several other people also want the salt? How likely are you to hear one or more of them saying the same thing you did.
I know that's a simplified example, but it illustrates the point. The 'tool' of Turnitin will highlight possible suspects, but it can't be relied upon to actually determine if there really was plagiarism.
Before they started marketing to those that want to avoid getting caught, I knew of a couple of students that used Turnitin before turning their papers in to make sure there was nothing a lazy teacher would try to accuse them of copying. Those two did their own work and didn't plagiarize, they were just paranoid about that one teacher. Of course, other students could have been using it to cheat, but who knows.
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.
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.
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.
You didn't take enough chemistry, and no you wouldn't like it very much.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Actually, an interesting factoid: Mr King did plagiarize from his students papers and use pieces of those papers verbatim in his speeches.
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.
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. :-)
You have a point, but nontrivial sentences repeat rarely. It's not hard to come up with a sentence that major search engines won't find anywhere. Get a book out of your bookshelf, select a couple sentences at random, and see for yourself. It's quite enlightening.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
Of course you hit one point on the head. Teachers need to ask BETTER QUESTIONS in their assignments!!! If a class has high plagiarism rates, then maybe it's time to see why you're assigning work that's easily repeatable and forgettable in the first place.
I've been going to one of the schools that has both campus and online classes. The biggest thing I see there is a shift to a focus on much more current work. Class are focused on discussing stuff happening right now, and applying topics in the reading material appropriately. It works well for "humanities" classes (which are probably the most highly copied anyway) because you're just not going to find many reports on current news articles out there.. or looking would be much more work.
Where that doesn't work are classes like first year chemistry where the department wants a "book report" on something totally irrelevant to the class work. Those are useless, a waste of time, and very easy to plagiarize because everybody is requesting the same report on the small pool of people that discovered hydrogen atoms.
Dat dere's why I's always usin' informal grammatical structures. Ain't no matter who's around, neither. Peeps be trippin, but I don't pay dem no mind.
Turnitin's Sources, and Database were made Public? Oh what a web I weave...
It has been way too long since you took an entry-level course.
1. There are only so many things that can be said about entry level subjects, but still students must write the papers so they learn to write the kind of papers you think they should just know how to write.
2. An accusation of plagiarism is to the current academic environment what accusations of witchcraft were in Salem in the seventeenth century.
Combine those two and you have a lot of kids tossed out on their asses just because of a flawed algorithm. But yeah, those professors would be total fools to give their students a tool that can both help them avoid that fate and help educate them about plagiarism.
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"
Mod parent up. This is the most poignant comment so far.
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
As I mentioned in another comment here, I was a Teaching Assistant for the last 1.5 years with a course that handled about 650 students a semester, each of whom wrote 3 essays that were submitted to Turnitin.com. We had 24 sections of students and 14 TAs, with each TA being responsible for 1-2 sections. It's simply impractical to have every TA read every essay submitted by every student in a class that large, yet we need to have a way to make sure that students in different sections aren't submitting the same essay. Turnitin.com checks essay submissions against one another, meaning we can use it to check for that sort of thing. Would you suggest we're being lazy in using Turnitin.com to check for plagiarism of that sort?
Besides, even if you didn't have a class that large, it's not as if an instructor has the Internet, every essay ever submitted, and the relevant textbooks memorized, so even if a student does plagiarize, it's oftentimes impossible or very difficult to tell. We had a student one semester who had an entire paper composed of content stolen from other sources. There were entire paragraphs stolen verbatim from Wikipedia, some others borrowed from FreeEssays.com, and an introduction stolen from a company website related to the essay topic, yet that student's paper didn't raise any red flags when the TA read it. I read through it too, and while it wasn't a good paper by any means, if it wasn't for the fact that Turnitin.com was able to tell me that each paragraph was stolen and show me the original source side-by-side with the essay, the student would have gotten away with it (and a lousy grade, to be fair). Instead, we were able to catch them and punish them appropriately for such a flagrant violation.
That's not laziness or incompetence on our part. Humans simply can't cross-check every sentence against a massive database of written texts. You need a computer for that. And that's why tools like Turnitin.com are necessary.
What are you, some kind of hippie RTFAing weirdo?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
Yes, but sites like turnitin want to collect every paper by essentially every student each year and store decades worth of these. Do you really mean to tell me that when hundreds of English teachers each year assign a paper on The Scarlet Letter that more than one student each year is going to have similar ideas? Now complie that upon decades and you'll see how poorly thought out this system is
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I had to use TurnItIn for a course I taught last academic year (I also had to use Blackboard, which is the worst piece of software I've ever used - if one of my students had submitted code that bad, they'd have failed). To test it, I tried getting one of my students to upload a copy of the course notes. He uploaded a copy of the PDF that was on my web site. TurnItIn found the copy on my web site, and said that the uploaded version was 70% similar to it. Now, if it thinks that two bit-for-bit identical documents are only 70% similar, I don't have much faith in it finding real cheating...
Oh, and it comes back with a lot of false positives because it doesn't know about quotes. If someone says: Poster hort_wort (in Slashdot post http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2422338&cid=37365024) posed the question "Did you use Turnitin to determine that?"
Then it would flag that quote as plagiarised and add it to the plagiarism total. This meant that the essays I got that cited a lot of sources were all flagged.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Why the hell is that comment at 3, Insightful? That quotation isn't even in any of the linked pages.
How could he have gotten fisht posht if he first had to verify whether the article did actually contain his fitting quote?
> 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.
Would you suggest we're being lazy in using Turnitin.com to check for plagiarism of that sort?
No, the OP is suggesting that your university was ripping those students off. I would agree. What is the point of having those students write those papers if over the course of three essays in a semester you cannot learn to recognize a student's particular writing style and thus realize that one or more of the papers was not actually written by the same person as the others (if they are plagiarizing, it is unlikely that they will get all three papers from the same source).
Of course, my experience in college suggests that any class that large is worthless anyway.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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'
You have a point, but nontrivial sentences repeat rarely. It's not hard to come up with a sentence that major search engines won't find anywhere....
Ah, but Turnitin prides itself on having clever algorithms that look for clever re-wordings and other reformulations intended to defeat attempts at matching. It is not just (or even primarily these days) looking for identical sequences. It is trying to engage in an arms race with adaptable plagarizers. Against that back drop the chances that a series of sentence expressing similar thoughts on a given topic will be judged "too similar" will go up astronomically.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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?
PHB: How's it going?
Developer: Got a problem. Whatever we do, we seem to be getting a false positive rate of about 30%.
PHB: Mmmm. Just knock 30 off the total.
Developer: I can see why you're in charge around here!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Come again? Ripping them off? It seems you're making some baseless assumptions about the nature of the class.
First, this class was for senior-level engineering students, not some purple prose inducing liberal arts class, and most of the TAs were from an engineering background. We're not English grad students who are used to parsing these sorts of essays for days on end and can readily recognize subtle distinctions in style that might indicate a different writer. We're just looking for the engineering students to put out the best essays they can on technical subjects in the short time we have them before they graduate.
The essays are merely one aspect of a much larger course, and their point was to have these students practice formal writing, since many of them had not done so for several years. A surprising number of students these days rely on SMS-speak, Internet slang, and other informal language in all of their writing, and we needed to get those habits out of their system before they tried applying for jobs. We did see a number of our students improve over the course of the semester, especially in their tone and level of formality, so it was not uncommon for writing styles to mature dramatically by the end of the semester, making comparisons between previous writing samples difficult at best.
Even if we had been those English major types who pick up on all the small things, if they had plagiarized their first essay, what are we to compare it against? And even good students have off days and write bad papers. You see plenty of papers that come out better or worse than the previous ones submitted by the same student. Sometimes they simply didn't understand the nature of the writing early on so they improve quite a bit later, other times they blew an essay off because they aced the previous one.
Tell me, if you read three essays from fifty students a semester — really read them —would you be able to tell if a single one of them had been written by someone other than the stated author? Without producing false positives that would have the potential to ruin someone's career? And if so, how would you prove it definitively? Academic review boards that handle academic dishonesty violations don't rely on hunches when they punish students. They need proof. Turnitin.com handles all of that. It's an invaluable tool.
Well, the alternative is the possibility of doing an inadequate percentage, so... I think I'd rather that people checked, and I'll continue to check myself as well, and learn that way. Good luck to you though.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
What "baseless assumptions" was I making, you are the one who said the course had 650 students a semester. At what students pay at a university today, if all they have is a TA to read and review the papers of 50 students in an upper level class, they are being ripped off.
Of course the real problem is that most of those students were not paying for an education, they were paying for a piece of paper that they needed to get a decent job (or at least what they perceive to be a decent job). If they were really paying for the education, the idea of plagiarizing the papers would be like going to the store and paying for a high quality piece of merchandise and sneaking out with a cheap knock-off.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Your entire post makes a lot of really bad assumptions. I wrote a long outline of everyting the first draft should contain. I picked the topic and did all the research -- including a long list of papers and appropriate ideas to draw from them. I made the entire presentation and wrote that from scratch, and I interfaced with the professor many times to get the topic figured out. In short, before he "wrote" the first draft (which he copied from various web pages without bothering to change a single word) I had already done something like 40 horus of work. I then turned around and did 40 more writing the a new paper from scratch. So I ended up doing 80 hours of work by myself and he got an A because I didn't report him for plagerism or get him kicked off my team.
Sorry for not spelling out for you. I didn't think it was relevant.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
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
But they're devaluing their prime product. It's like selling one army a nerve gas and selling the other army gas masks.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Everyone loves feminists! Even if they're attacking things that don't exist.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
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.