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.

dunno

[spottedkangaroo]

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?

Re:dunno

[Anubis IV]

Your idea falls apart for the simple fact that Turnitin.com doesn't suggest false positives.

For the last year and a half, I was a Teaching Assistant assigned to a senior-level engineering ethics course at a major university. We had about 650+ students every semester, and each of them would submit 3 essays via Turnitin.com. Out of the 14 TAs and 4 professors associated with the course, it fell to me to check for cheaters via Turnitin.com for all of those essays.

To make a long story short, rather than the essays going into a black box with Turnitin.com spitting out a list of of cheaters on the other side, which is what you seem to think happens, Turnitin.com ranks the students by telling the instructor what percentage of the student's paper is a match with other sources. It doesn't label them as a cheater or automatically give them a 0. Instead, the instructor can click on the essay via Turnitin.com, and Turnitin.com will highlight each portion of the essay for which it found a match, showing the instructor the original text side-by-side with the essay. That allows the instructor to make an informed decision on whether or not the student is guilty of plagiarism.

Had they not structured it that way, you'd be absolutely correct. In my time with the course, it wasn't uncommon to see average scores for matches in the 15-25% range (i.e. 15-25% of every student's paper could be identified as coming from another source). Most of that, however, was either a result of quotations, coincidental phrasing (there are only so many unique ways to discuss ideas on a narrow topic, so there's quite a bit of overlap between 650 students), or bibliographies (Turnitin.com can be told to ignore bibliographies, but if you don't have it do that, then they'll oftentimes show up as a match with the other students citing the same references).

Anyway, because of the severity of academic dishonesty allegations (I saw one estimate that failing a class due to academic dishonesty costs a student about $100,000 over their career), a responsible instructor would never rely on a black box to tell them who was cheating. Every academic council, honor council, review board, or whatever else I've heard of demands to see evidence before punishing a student, and a responsible instructor should have had that prepared whenever they made the initial allegation anyway. Turnitin.com's job, rather than labeling cheaters, is merely to identify possible plagiarism and put the information in the hands of the instructor so that they can make an informed decision, and it does that job well.

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.

Re:Offensive

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Re:Tweaking and submitting

[Baloroth]

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.