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.
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.
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
Too bad Slashdot doesn't use something like this; plenty of submissions lately are lifted wholesale from somewhere else, without even a trivial rephrasing.
I fail to see why a brief summary of someone else's article -- plus a link to it -- needs rephrasing. The original author's words are the whole point. The lame summaries are the ones when the submitter uses the summary as an opportunity to editorialize when they didn't even understand the article they submitted.
Breakfast served all day!
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!
Please see me after class, Mike.
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.
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?
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
That's a foolish, misleading example on which to dismiss the concern out of hand. How many business models or product designs have come to someone during their undergraduate years, leading the inventor to drop out and create global corporations or life-changing social innovations? Where would we be if Mark Zuckerberg or Shawn Fanning or Bill Gates had written about their ideas in their "intro" computer science classes and had some bullshit like this take away their opportunity to copyright or patent their ideas? And what if it wasn't even the university that got to steal it, but Turnitin.com?
Never, ever underestimate the seriousness of requiring someone to surrender intellectual ownership of things written or invented on their own time as a condition of getting an education or a job or anything else.
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.
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.
Funny story. I wrote a paper (way) back in college for a creative writing class in which I included an original poem at the beginning. The teacher wrote "Source?" next to the poem. I chided her that I don't have to cite myself in my own paper. I still don't know if I should be flattered or insulted that she didn't think it my work. (sigh)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I don't know if a class could do it for everyone. Socially inept geeks may need one-on-one tutoring, where they are to write papers, and the tutor is to grade them, discuss the mistakes, and provide guidance for improvement. This is not horribly expensive either, if you know where to look. A high school teacher should be plenty enough -- in most of Europe, at least. Ideally look for teachers that got geeks for significant others.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
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.
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.
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Lets say that I hand you a pile with 240 10-page technical reports from students, and give you 2 weeks to grade them. About 5% of them looks "fishy" when you read them (not an unusual statistic at a major university by the way). There can be multiple reasons, like different style of writing, illustrations that doesn't quite fit the subject, sudden bursts of exceptional detail and so on.
Without any text matching service you now have to basically go to the library and try to locate the sources, examine old papers and cross match between students. This is hours, if not days, of work per paper. Once you have located the exact sources you have to write up a report and send to the disciplinary board.
The text matching service saves you a considerable amount of time. First of all you can put the high score reports in a separate pile, examine the matches more carefully and consider if they should be send to the disciplinary board. The hours or days in the library are more or less over. Secondly the "turnitin" logo acts as a "don't be stupid" warning to the student. In my experience it reduces the amount of badly plagiarized work significantly.