Plagiarism
my university is beta testing Turnitin. Turnitin is a service that we offer through Blackboard. i create an assignment and students submit their papers in Blackboard. Turnitin then runs the paper through its testing and provides a report showing whether anything has been plagiarized or not.
i had an opportunity to try it out this week on a master’s thesis chapter 1. part of the document was copied straight from an online resource . . . to the tune of 36% of the submitted document. i warned the students that i would be using this service and i still received a paper from a student who was testing the limits. crummy stuff.
i have to say, the service is outstanding from a teaching perspective. the service even subscribes to ProQuest (online database of research articles) and checks submitted papers against the literature in the field. the report that gets generated is color coded so that i can see color-coded text that matches the color coded articles that are listed at the top. here is a snapshot of the top of the report where it shows the documents that appear to have been copied:
 
as i read through the actual document, the text in the document that matches the targeted articles above is shown in the color to match the cite above. for example, the 36% match would appear as red text in the document below. the 4% match would be dark green. it is detailed enough to even catch a few matching words out of a longer sentence. of course, many of the 1% and below examples are likely just coincidence, but having it all right there to scan is quite delightful.
my students know i am using this service and i just sent a reminder, so i hope that i don’t have to deal with plagiarism any more this semester. i wonder how much of what i received before turnitin would have been caught? when i suspected anything in the past, i’d take a sentence or sentence fragment and run it through a google search. but, turnitin is much more comprehensive. i have no clue what we pay to use it, but i have to think it’s worthwhile.
Tags: turnitin, plagiarism, thesis, research
June 18th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
I think that its sad that even masters students are plagiarizing content in their thesis. I would have hoped that by that level in a person’s education he or she would understand how bad it is to steal other people’s thoughts. Not only is it stealing, but it really isn’t helping the student learn anything. Turnitin sounds like a great way to catch students who are plagiarizing the content of their papers and assignments. Hopefully if students realize that they will get caught, they will think a little harder before they steal content from other papers.
September 6th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
I’m betting you might have seen the position statement I co-authored by now. I’ll have to differ with you, Sean
Turnitin “may” be an okay tool for catching plagiarism (I’m not convinced of that), but I wouldn’t say that it “is outstanding from a teaching perspective.” Turnitin doesn’t teach students how to paraphrase and cite appopriately; it only catches them when they don’t. It also allows teachers to avoid helping students who have problems and teaching good research skills in favor of merely labeling a student a plagiarist. If Turnitin were always being used for teaching, students would all be submitting to it prior to turning in a final draft so that they could fix any potential problems. I doubt that is usually the case.
September 6th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
I think the thesis is a place where students are really out on their own. I meet with them 2 times to discuss how to approach the writing and to help them understand the parameters, but my hope is that we’ve helped teach this kind of professional writing in the coursework leading up to the thesis. I give a lot of feedback using the reviewing tools in Word, but it’s more difficult to “teach†in a thesis class than it is a regular master’s level course. TurnItIn is probably not a good “teaching†tool, so I’d agree with you there. Instead of teaching tool, i really meant to say it was a nice “teacher tool†or “management tool” might even be better because it’s a tool that I can use to catch plagiarism — I have 1 student who did it in the example I provided and he copied from sources that weren’t refereed journals, so I probably wouldnt’ have caught it without Turnitin. and, i had two other students who had minor instances caught (a few sentences in one paragraph — sans a changed word here and there to try and trick turnitin), which allowed me to provide more guided instruction on how I would have written what they copied and to explain paraphrasing and why it’s important to get to the original source instead of relying on what someone else wrote about a study in their own review of the literature. In this sense, I was using Turnitin as a tool to help illustrate my point. I didn’t allow my students to submit drafts into the service; they merely submitted their final chapter when they were ready for me to read it and give my feedback, so they couldn’t test things out.
I ended up not using it past chapter 1 because I felt dirty using the service. You want to trust your students, but you also want to recognize that a thesis gets published and I’d hate to have my advising name on a file that gets published that has been plagiarized. If I had come across a paper that caused me to suspect plagiarism, then I would have secretly submitted it into turnitin myself just to see, but it didn’t come up after chapter 1. Perhaps because I used it and let everyone know that I caught someone right off of the bat??? I don’t know for sure.
I’ll have to look up your position to better understand your position.
September 7th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Well, we seem to be talking back and forth on two sites
I do believe that Matt’s comment over on Knews describes the best way to use it assuming one wants to. I’m just very ideologically opposed for many other reasons. The CCCC IP Caucus will have a statement coming out soon (hopefully in the next couple of weeks) that goes through in detail many of my objections.
As you would probably guess, the document written for GVSU is more reserved given the audience and purpose.
I’ll post on Knews about the CCCC IP statement once it’s on the web in case you want to read it.