Turnitin
takes a bite out of plagiarism
By
Jeff Laben
Online Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer
Turnitin.com has been working to prevent plagiarism since 1996 around the world,
and it is currently being used at Cal State Long Beach.
According to Turnitin’s main Web site, Turnitin is an Internet based
program that checks a student’s work against over 4.5 billion live Internet
pages, previous versions of the Internet, all prior student submissions and
various ProQuest® databases, with millions of pages added to the database
daily. It then creates an
Originality Report with a percentage of how much information directly matched
that of the Internet, while quoting its sources.
“
It is a wonderful opportunity for my students and myself,” said journalism
professor Jennifer Fleming. “It can be used to further the knowledge
of referencing and citation, while it creates a level and fair grading structure
giving a safeguard against plagiarism.”
Turnitin’s Web site claims instances of plagiarism have dropped to almost
zero at one California public university.
“
This saves people from those who copy and paste a whole project,” senior
aerospace engineering major Omer Tugayoglu said. “You do the whole project,
while they get an A and you get a B. It separates the hardworking and good
from the lazy and bad.”
However, not all students are that impressed by Turnitin’s demonstration.
“
[It is a] waste of time,” sophomore criminal justice major Chris Delacruz
said. “You end up having to submit stuff early. Another thing you have
to worry about is if you quoted everything right.”
Turnitin.com noted a few plagiarism facts they have obtained. 80 percent of
all college bound students admit to cheating on schoolwork, yet 95 percent
of them never get caught. A Congressional researcher noted that 44 percent
of students considered minor cut-and-paste plagiarism as trivial cheating or
not cheating at all.
“
Far from being a digital policeman, I found that Turnitin was actually an excellent
teaching tool,” said professor Gillian Mothersill of Ryerson University. “When
student work was not cited properly, I was able to sit down with them and explain
the importance of citations, and demonstrate to them where the problems lay.
Having Turnitin do the detective work took some of the confrontation out of
this situation.”
Turnitin.com currently monitors over 70 million students in over 50 countries,
though not all proffesors need to apply the use of it to their classrooms.
“
The nature of our University 100 class is not something people would steal
off the Internet,” said Leading Alliance Program Coordinator Mary Anne
Rose. “It is hard to plagiarize your own personal experiences.”
“
[There is] nothing wrong with it,” junior finance major Nolan Duquette
said. “[It] sucks they have to make people write their own stuff.”
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