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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.
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.
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
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!
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?
Yes, you're the typical grandmother if ever there was one.
She is now.
Really, maybe not '20 years of C programming' (that puts her in crazy land), but everything else is fairly typical these days. Outside of Pakistan, that is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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 think the point is, you can use WriteCheck to see if it would count as plagiarism, then modify it to the point where it won't.
Of course, how much you need to modify each paper might mean that it would be simpler to just write the thing yourself... but never underestimate how much work a student will go through to avoid doing work.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
My first semester in college, I was taking an intro physics class that had a mandatory 10-question Calculus quiz online. We could take it as many times as we wanted, but we had to score a 100% on it in order to get a passing grade for the quiz (our data was anonymized, so our names were only tied to our final score). The questions were pulled from a pool of 25, and after I spent 20-30 minutes on it the first time, only to be foiled by a single mistake on one question, I got it into my head to just submit answers, note the question-answer pair for the ones I got correct, and repeat it until I got them all correct. It took me about 20 more minutes of note taking and quick submissions before I got 10 questions that I had the answers for. I figured it was a good tradeoff since I didn't have to worry about computation errors on my part eating up more of my time.
The next day, the professor got up and sincerely praised all of us for our perseverance and tenacity in working through the difficult quiz. In particular, he wanted to praise one student who took the quiz 39 times before getting all 10 questions correct. He didn't know who it was, but he was clearly exuberant that he had a student so dedicated to excelling in the class. I didn't have the heart to tell him what I had actually done.