turnitin.com...

[Horus]

turnitin.com has just become popular in our school this year. for almost every class that evolves writing the teacher will ask you hand stuff in to turnitin. This haven't affected me at all because I don't have any course that evolves writing. However this have come to my attention from my friends who have those courses that requires you to hand in stuff through turnitin. They've shown me what turnitin is like, basically from what i've seen turnitin mostly catches common sentences and consider them as plagiarism and forces my friends to reword the sentences until it no longer consider it as plagiarism, I noticed that now most of my friends rather purposely make grammar mistakes to avoid getting caught for plagiarism. They said that their teacher will give them 0 if more than 10% of their essay is considered as plagiarized by turnitin. So now it seems that turnitin has changed alot to the way the students writes essay. Their first priority in writing essay has shifted to keep on trying random sentences that a computer program won't consider as "plagiarism" instead of writing a well structured essay. Instead of trying to correct grammar mistakes they are now purposely making them to avoid "plagiarism". I feel that this whole thing is just stupid. I could never stand a computer program that keeps on accusing you that you copied someone else every time you write.

[[Gandalf]]

Sounds like more of a problem with the restrictions they set... It's ridiculous to set one random percentage to consider as 'plagiarism' and not look into it beyond that. For something that serious, they should be reviewing each essay (or whatever it is) individually before failing it.

[Insectoid]

well, I can see from your post that you aren't doing any spelling/grammer classes :p. My teacher actually wrote his own plaigerism-detecting program that seems to work fairly well. I think it may be the sheer quantity of essays the website is checking against that screws the students over. This very inconsistent paragraph is only half on topic.

[Tony]

There's a difference between plagiarism -- as in taking someone's ideas as your own; and the use of common expressions or trivial structures. Taking a definition of "plagiarism" as common knowledge, there is a limited number of permutations to describe it. It is unreasonable to expect every student to express a common idea in a completely unique way (for one, the idea itself is already common). Perhaps an exact match to the dictionary definition should be a red flag, unless it's put in quotations and cited. I imagine that the implementations of such exceptions would be difficult to get accurate.

If the students are forced to change their own sentences -- the system does not work, it should be protested and replaced.

[saltpro15]

Tony, when does "the system" EVER work ? I've heard about this program too, gr12 students at high schools around here have to submit electronic copies of everything to their teacher, sounds tiresome.

[Ultrahex]

Personally I would fight the use of turnitin.com, because in my opinion once you submit it to turnitin.com you are plagurising if you hand another copy of your work to the teacher, because you don't technically own your work anymore.

Many universities allow students to make alternatives to using turnitin.com due to the controversy around it.

From: http://www.rsuonline.ca/index.php?section_id=279
"Unfortunately, once your work is submitted, it becomes property of the private US-based company that operates turnitin.com."

Yes, this means if you wrote anything that could make a profit they can say they owned what you submitted and using such means that it was their work not yours cause they "bought" it off of you.

On top of this, your teachers should understand that turnitin.com is not a completely effective tool, what should be happening is the bottom 10% of students (in terms of amount it saying is plagiarized) should be checked by the teacher personally, and all grades that are abnormal for each student to get within the class should also be checked. It is crazy to think administration is allowing this.

[sambler]

It seems to work fine at my University, but it doesn't seem to be set up as strict. We submit it to turnitin, and then it'll point out any suspect plagiarism to the professor, but ultimately it's up to them to decide if it's actual plagiarism, or if it's just a common phrase.

[md]

Unless I'm mistaken schools in Canada do not yet have the right to force you to licence your work to a third party without compensation.

Refuse, and if that doesn't work talk to a lawer.