2008 Woodie Awards
Turnitin.com scrunitizes plagiarism
By: U- WIRE
Issue date: 3/12/08 Section: Campus
LOS ANGELES - Since its creation in 1996, Turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism site, has been continually scrutinized by students and teachers questioning its legality and practicality, culminating with a lawsuit that ended in January.
USC began using Turnitin in conjunction with Blackboard in August 2006, paying $30,000 for the program in order to prevent plagiarism, which remains the "most frequently violated academic code," said Raquel Torres-Retana, the director of the Office of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards.
SJACS reported 179 cases of plagiarism in the 2005-2006 academic year and 166 cases from 2006-2007.
"USC's inclusion of Turnitin came about as a demand from faculty in the writing programs as a way to level the playing field. The crux of it all was that faculty members were receiving complaints about students plagiarizing from other students, who used online services and other students' papers to plagiarize," said Otto Khera, the interim director of the Center for Scholarly Technology.
Turnitin primarily detects unoriginal work. After a student submits a paper through Turnitin, their professor receives an originality report showing how much of the student's work is borrowed from other sources. It also lets students peer review each other's work and allows professors to give more detailed feedback.
The site's growing database is its selling point. The more sources it has access to, the better the odds of catching plagiarism. The site partners with 8,500 institutions in 103 countries and receives 125,000 papers a day.
Despite its intentions, however, Turnitin has been a source of controversy among high school and college students who claim Turnitin is profiting off students without fair compensation.
In 2006, two high school students from McLean High School in Virginia and two students from an Arizona high school challenged Turnitin, arguing it violated their intellectual property rights by incorporating their submitted work into its database of billions of sources, including public domain materials, manuscripts and other students' work.
USC began using Turnitin in conjunction with Blackboard in August 2006, paying $30,000 for the program in order to prevent plagiarism, which remains the "most frequently violated academic code," said Raquel Torres-Retana, the director of the Office of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards.
SJACS reported 179 cases of plagiarism in the 2005-2006 academic year and 166 cases from 2006-2007.
"USC's inclusion of Turnitin came about as a demand from faculty in the writing programs as a way to level the playing field. The crux of it all was that faculty members were receiving complaints about students plagiarizing from other students, who used online services and other students' papers to plagiarize," said Otto Khera, the interim director of the Center for Scholarly Technology.
Turnitin primarily detects unoriginal work. After a student submits a paper through Turnitin, their professor receives an originality report showing how much of the student's work is borrowed from other sources. It also lets students peer review each other's work and allows professors to give more detailed feedback.
The site's growing database is its selling point. The more sources it has access to, the better the odds of catching plagiarism. The site partners with 8,500 institutions in 103 countries and receives 125,000 papers a day.
Despite its intentions, however, Turnitin has been a source of controversy among high school and college students who claim Turnitin is profiting off students without fair compensation.
In 2006, two high school students from McLean High School in Virginia and two students from an Arizona high school challenged Turnitin, arguing it violated their intellectual property rights by incorporating their submitted work into its database of billions of sources, including public domain materials, manuscripts and other students' work.
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