BU now using Turnitin plagiarism detection software
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Beginning this fall, Baker University has renewed its subscription to Turnitin, a controversial plagiarism detection software, to aid faculty and students in the discovery and prevention of plagiarism on campus.
About Turnitin
The Turnitin website markets the product as “technology to improve student writing” that was created in the late 1990s. Turnitin’s Feedback Studio says it has amassed a collection of more than 600 million student papers.
How To Cheat Turnitin
Approximately five years ago, Baker University used a licensed plagiarism-detection software, but because of budget concerns, discontinued the service. Since then, faculty members have voiced their desire to have an equitable and consistent tool for finding and assessing incidents of student plagiarism.
Despite Turnitin’s success in college spheres over the years, the software has received mixed reviews. There have been some law cases, like Vanderhye v. iParadigms LLC, featuring students who have refused to submit their papers to the program – all submitted papers are saved to an external database to which another party could have access – on the grounds Turnitin is violating their copyright and privacy rights. Both a district and an appeals courts affirmed Turnitinwas in the right under fair use – using the papers in a new and innovative way. Fearing the potential for future lawsuits, though, some colleges have either banned the entire service or have incorporated a policy exempting students from being required to submit work if they choose not to.
Students have also posted on various forums – such as YouTube comment sections and Reddit feeds – saying that they have failed an assignment, or been asked to rewrite work, due to a large percentage of their paper being flagged as plagiarism, when they say they did not plagiarize and that it was due to professor and/or software error. Some students’ posts suggest that the professor-errors are a result of a lack of knowledge of how the software works, and the system-errors stem from a computer not understanding the circumstances or context in which the flagged portions are set. Lego marvel super heroes 2.
When a paper is submitted, the Turnitin software flags any instance of possible plagiarism, including quotes, the bibliography source, required/standard subject heading, article names and amount of similarity to other papers. It then calculates a percentage of the submitted work that is plagiarized or similar to other works.
A blog post published by Turnitin on its website stated its response to such student claims:
“There is a very distinct difference between what Turnitin flags as matching text (aka: similarity index) and plagiarism. Turnitin will highlight any matching material in a paper – even if it is properly quoted and cited. Just because it appears as unoriginal does not mean it is plagiarized; it just means that the material matches something in the Turnitin databases.
We leave it to the instructors to look at a paper and the originality report to make the determination of whether or not something is plagiarism, and to what extent – intentional plagiarism, unintentional plagiarism, improper/lack of citation or mere coincidence. Best practices from instructors suggest that Turnitin OriginalityCheck be used as a teaching tool to address citation and academic honesty, not only as a punitive tool .”
Spurred by this controversy, Susan Schorn, a writing flag coordinator at the University of Texas in Austin, was inspired to conduct a study about the effectiveness of both Turnitin and UT’s plagiarism detection software of choice, SafeAssign, in discovering plagiarism. She started her study in 2007 and conducted a follow-up in 2015. Schorn’s experiment began with a sample of test essays with 23 commonly-cited sources among humanities courses, including various levels of plagiarism. During her study, Schorn concluded that Google searches surpassed both systems in the amount of copied material detected and simplicity of use. Although, both systems could outperform Google in collusion, or similarity, of papers, for the 23 plagiarized sources in the papers – which were strategically placed there by Schorn and her colleagues based on common methods they saw in students’ papers – Google, again, surpassed both systems in the amount of correctly-found plagiarism with 91.3 percent. Turnitin and SafeAssign found 60.76 and 43.4 percent, respectively.
Schorn’s data suggests that while Turnitin is more effective than competing software, it is not as effective as manual Google searches.
The overall effectiveness and usefulness of Turnitin as a plagiarism detection software may be up to colleges, faculty and students to determine themselves.
Turnitin at Baker
How this software will affect Baker University has yet to be seen, considering it is the start of the year and Faculty Senate is currently in the process of amending Baker’s academic misconduct and plagiarism policies to include more strict measures of dealing with dishonesty.
Mass Media and Visual Arts Department Chair Joe Watson said that Baker is not requiring faculty and students to use Turnitin, but faculty members do have it available as a tool to detect and prevent plagiarism.
“There is no policy that says Baker faculty have to use this software,” Watson said. “I am sure there are going to be some of my colleagues that don’t want to use it, and if they don’t want to, they don’t have to.”
Watson says that he is passionate about plagiarism, and he will spend a lot of time trying to find it if he suspects it in a student paper. He knows that Turnitin is not perfect, but he sees it as a valuable teaching tool for students to learn how to avoid plagiarizing.
“Frankly, I plan to use [Turnitin] as a tool,” he said. “One of the things I want to do is have students turn in drafts, so that if there is something that raises a flag, they have the opportunity to change it. I find no pleasure in finding plagiarism. Telling a student that I found plagiarism in one of their papers is one of the most painful things I do as a professor … If there is a tool that I can use in one of my classes that students could use to submit a draft and catch something like, ‘Oh, my gosh! I forgot to cite that! Or ‘I forgot a quotation mark!’ – things like that do happen – and students can avoid it and clean it up before they turn in a final version, I am all for that.”
Acknowledging the issues of professors not understanding the program fully, Watson said that the Baker faculty has set up training sessions where faculty learn how to use the software correctly. Watson knows that a computer-generated software like Turnitin still needs a human element to be most effectively used.
“I think with any software system, nothing is ever going to be perfect. It is important how you use it,” he said. “If the computer software messes up, I am not going to hold [students] accountable for that. I think that, like with anything, you have to learn how to use it and not abuse it … You have to include a human element, not just take the report and use it verbatim. It will produce a report but you have to use your own common sense to read the report and apply it as you see fit.”
Watson said he is looking forward to implementing the Turnitin software in his classes in the coming weeks as both a teaching tool and a way to lift the burden of his plagiarism hunting.
“Something I am excited about is that this takes the burden off me as a professor. I can submit it, wait for the report to come back, read the paper, look at the report and make a judgment. I am sure there are things that might be better, but it’s all in how you use it.”
Agreeing with Watson, senior English literature major Kristen Robbs thinks that Turnitin could be a good source for helping students understand plagiarism.
“I also know that sometimes plagiarism can be hard to understand. Especially working as a writing tutor, I can see how hard it can be to understand how to take someone else’s ideas and use them to support your own without taking credit for their work,” Robbs said. “I think this software is a good start to physically demonstrating what plagiarism is and opening students’ eyes to ways they may be plagiarizing and not realize it. For underclassmen in particular, it could really up the learning curve on knowing how to write a research paper with your personal opinion as well as the opinions of others.”
Robbs is familiar with software like this and thinks it is a helpful tool for both students and faculty. Her father was a teacher and used this software to check his students’ work.
“My dad has used this program before as a teacher, and it was helpful for him to be able to double-check on papers that seemed off,” Robbs said. “Sometimes it would frustrate him to see how students would try to get away with blatant plagiarism. “I think it’s a nice tool to have at the school’s disposal, both for professors and students, and will help identify and improve on plagiarism problems, but it must be used wisely and, especially initially, with a dose of grace; otherwise, it could turn into a case of guilty until proven innocent.”
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Tufts University has a University-wide contract with the Turnitin plagiarism detection service.
Instructors can arrange to have papers submitted to the Trunk Assignments tool checked, by Turnitin, for potential unoriginal content by comparing submitted papers to several databases using a proprietary algorithm. Turnitin scans the Internet, its own databases, and also has licensing agreements with large academic proprietary databases. Instructors receive (in the Trunk Assignments tool) an “Originality Report” from Turnitin for each student submission.
Turnitin can be used only once per assignment. If you have students submitting a 'draft' paper assignment and assign a Turnitin originality report to it, you will need to create a second assignment for Turnitin to check the final draft of the paper.
The Tufts contract with Turnitin is an instructor only service. Students cannot check their own papers via Turnitin without an instructor created assignment.
Note:When Turnitin is used on an assignment, students will have a note on their assignment form indicating that the assignment will be checked by the Turnitin plagiarism service.
To use Turnitin:
There are many reasons why you may want to resubmit to Turnitin. Perhaps you discover a mistake, or you were only checking your similarity report ahead of the deadline. This guide helps you to understand what you can and cannot do with resubmissions.
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Resubmissions are possible up until the due date. You may upload an updated version of your paper as many times as you need to up until the deadline. Ideally, please use your Turnitin Test page (accessible via Dashboard or My modules) to check your similarity score and only upload your final versions onto the module page.
Before the due date, you can simply follow the same process used for submitting an assignment.
If the inbox was set up not to allow late submissions, you will not be able to upload anything to it after the deadline has passed.
If the inbox was set up to accept late submissions, you will have one single attempt to upload your final version after the deadline but only if you hadn’t previously made a submission. If you have though, you will receive the following error message and Turnitin will not allow you to overwrite your previous paper.
If you still wish to make a submission after the deadline, please discuss this with your tutor.
Why does the similarity report say Pending after I resubmit?
Turnitin allows you to resubmit 3 times, and then you must wait 24 hours. If you make a resubmission, you will see this message:
You have already submitted a paper to this assignment and a Similarity Report was generated for your submission. If you choose to resubmit your paper, your earlier submission will be replaced and a new report will be generated. After 3 resubmissions, you will need to wait 24 hours after a resubmission to see a new Similarity Report.
This policy is set by TurnitinUK. Moodle Support is not able to override this or make reports generate faster. We will not delete submissions so that you can start resubmitting again.
This does not mean that your submission will be considered late, even if the report is still pending after the due date. The time and date shown in the submitted column is considered your official submission time. Your tutors all understand that sometimes the report will take longer.
Please only contact us if the report has taken longer than 24 hours to appear. Contact us with a link to the Moodle site, the name of the inbox where you submitted it, and the Paper ID number.
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With so many papers written here and there on any subject, it is next to impossible to write a text that is 100% original. Each time, you fear that there may have been some kid on the other end of the world who apparently had the same idea.
Thinking about it, every teacher nowadays teaches us that “the author meant this” and “the author meant that.” If they have been drilling into us what they want us to think, how are we supposed to come with something original? Basically, all of our ideas are a mirror of something someone else already thought. That idea was eventually written in the textbook, so like the good soldiers that we are, we follow that idea. What they do not realize is that through that, they are actually teaching us how to plagiarize someone else’s ideas.
Turnitin – The Number One Enemy
Every modern student goes nowadays through the same struggle: how to not get caught by Turnitin. Granted, all of our works are supposed to be original, but an essay takes too long to write. Most of the students have classes from morning until dusk, which makes it kind of difficult to write an original essay yourself. A person still needs to sleep, don’t they? That's when the students go to the paper writing services and make orders. Contrary to what our teachers seem to believe, we’re humans, not robots! But still, they decided to bring Turnitin in the picture.
So what is Turnitin? Turnitin is a plagiarism detector that catches strings of similar texts. So if somewhere there’s a long lost twin of your essay, Turnitin will definitely find it. When are they going to make a version of this for people? It will definitely help more lost siblings happy than it helps students. Still, the question remains: how to cheat on an essay without getting caught by the evil Turnitin? Can you actually do it?
Be a Proper Copy-Paster
You can be a master copy-paster if you learn the trick. This will work better on Apple computers than PCs (because Macintosh is definitely our new favorite). All you’ll have to do is hit your Mac and go to the wriggly line thingie + C and put that little blinky vertical line where your plagiarized, Wikipedia copied text will go. After that, click on “Edit,” follow it with a “Paste Special” and end it with an “Unformatted text.” This way, your text will be as clear as day, without any awkward different sizes and codes caught from the Internet page. Looking pretty now, doesn’t it? But now you’re probably thinking: this text is clear-off the same thing from the page! How to copy and paste and not get caught by that vile plagiarism detector every teacher seems to love? It will sure be caught if I turn it in like this!
Escape the Clutches of Turnitin
Many students have lost the fight with Turnitin. Others won it gloriously and followed it with a night of celebration. We have talked with those students that managed to trick the hell out of Turnitin and give it a run for its money. One of the things they kept recommending was to switch letters into another, foreign font that looks pretty much the same. So how to plagiarise without getting caught based on that, you may ask? It’s simple. Take the letter “e” from Cyrillic and use it instead of your “e.”
Just go to the good old Google and look for “Cyrillic e.” Then hit Apple + F in the document, which should bring out the “Find” menu. You will go towards the “find and replace” menu, where you will instruct it to find “e” and replace it with the Cyrillic version of “e.” You can also look up macro. With this, you can take a plagiarized text and replace with some non-plagiarized mumbo jumbo. Your teacher will see the copied text while Turnitin will see the other thing.
Technically, none of this can be called cheating; you’re simply writing on your computer. The fact that you’re customizing it or writing in your chosen alphabet should be completely irrelevant. Plus, didn’t your teachers tell you to ‘respect the opinions of the critics?” Well, you sure are… to the point where you want to use everything they said. This was our version on how to copy and paste an essay without getting caught. We hope you found it helpful.
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