Students sue Turnitin.comFollow

Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.
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"All of these kids are essentially straight-A students, and they have no interest in plagiarizing," said Robert A. Vanderhye, a McLean attorney representing the students pro bono. "The problem with [Turnitin] is the archiving of the documents. They are violating a right these students have to be in control of their own property."

If a teacher can't spot his/her students own work she/he isn't spending enough time paying attention to the essays they have been handing in. People write with a select style. I can pick out Joph's, Bodh's, and Smash's writing without really looking at their names. I mean if a "D" student turns in an "A+" paper I'd probably take a second look at it and check his references.

I also got notes from teachers who deal with plagiarism every day in the classroom. Steven Rubio outlines an interesting dilemma: "The only plagiarists I catch are the ones who are bad at it. The best plagiarists know how to pull it off so that I never even get suspicious. The worst plagiarists, the ones who panic after a bad grade on their first paper and submit a subsequent paper of such high quality that Jon Carroll could have written it, are caught more often than not. I end up punishing students for being bad at cheating. What makes this especially sad is that the grades these students ultimately receive for the course probably reflect their real-world abilities in the world of the job market: If you are good enough at getting others to do your work that you don't get caught, you will be rewarded."

Teacher Bernice Goldmark had another experience: "When I told some freshmen college students who were at a University in the East about this, they said they knew how to beat the system. All ears, I asked how. The answer was that they didn't use source material from the Internet, but, rather, went to the library and copied from books! Evidently not all books are available online."

So I wrote a paper entailing his love of interpretative dance, with an underscore of **** erotic and sexually bi-curious statements.

I didn't get my money, and I actually had to run for my life at one point, but it was the most satisfactory cheating that I have ever done!

If a teacher can't spot his/her students own work she/he isn't spending enough time paying attention to the essays they have been handing in.

When Turnitin finds a match to an online source, it will show me, side by side, the text the student submitted along with the archived version of the online source, with the matching words and sections highlighted. I get a percentage score for each source (how much of the student's paper matches text in that source), and an overall percentage score (how much of the student's paper matches other sources). It's not perfect, but it's a fairly sophisticated algorithm. It's not without its flaws. It doesn't seem to keep up too well with Wikipedia, the number one source of student info these days, for better or for worse. Still, so many other pages crib from Wikipedia now, it usually catches it from another site.

In addition to telling me if the student deliberately plagiarized, it lets me know if they inadvertantly plagiarized or incorrectly cited (Quotes without citations, cited quotes that should have been unquoted paraphrases due to rewording by the paper's author, etc.) Learning how to make proper fair use of others' material is also an important set of skills the students need to learn, and Turnitin helps make easy.

As far as its submitted paper archive, if Turnitin finds a matching source in there, it tells me what school the paper was submitted to, and when. If I try to click on those source links to compare the actual text side by side, I get instead a message informing me that I need to contact the copyright holder to get a copy of it for myself.

If it's a paper from my own school, I can look at it directly however. The first student to submit the text will receive a percentage-match score relative to other sources. The second student will get a score based on the other sources PLUS the first student's paper.