Where there is a demand, there will arise a supply.
In the contemporary world, where any child with a research assignment can find a closely related paper on the internet with unprecedented ease, and then with a couple of clicks copy it to his own file and put his name on it, there is a great demand for plagiarism detection software. Teachers want to know, quickly and reliably, which of their students has done just that.
Apparently the two best known programs marketed as the answer to this prayer are: turnitin and Safe Assignment.
Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs in such efforts.
I have no profound point to make here, I'd just like to encourage anyone with any talent in the area of software development whose talents aren't already fully deployed to think about this as one field for their exercise. The teachers of the world could use your help. And market forces will make it worth your while.
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Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.
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- Born in 1958, on the western side of the Tappan Zee, vocal at once, literate soon enough, and curious always. Mastodon
2 comments:
As an instructor at the Washington Post's Kaplan University, I'm required to use turnitin.com. It's like using a calculator to add: as you accustom yourself to the tool, you turn off your brain somewhat. I'm old-fashioned and like to use my brain. As a seasoned teacher, I can spot plagiarism a mile away without the help of an elaborate platform, and I can always google a suspicious string of words and easily trace the source.
That said, turnitin isn't hard to use. Any teacher worth her salt can analyze the reports with ease. What I'm looking for is a whole bright-red paragraph which doesn't have quotation marks around it, not a spotty chain of keywords and statistically probable phrases.
I should add that I once suspected a student of plagiarism, based on inaccurate and outdated references. Turnitin gave her a clean report. I nevertheless found the entire paper--title, references, and all--on somebody else's myspace page. Not sure how turnitin missed that one.
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