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.

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: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:configuration options exist

[RobinEggs]

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.

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.

Re:So what exactly is the crime here?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.