Uni plagiarism site buckles under crush of last-minute essays Student-sniffing site Turnitin went down in the UK for 24 hours over Monday and yesterday, leaving last-minute essays piled up in the plagiarism spotter's inbox. Turnitin is a software service that checks through student essays for instances of plagiarism based on searches over the net, and some universities now require …
My son handed in coursework in school and the teacher said it was so good she thought he'd copied it from somewhere so had run it through this sort of check. In fact he hadn't which the check proved.
Unfortunately being a teenager his response to this was to lose interest in the class and put in less effort on the basis that if he was going to be accused of cheating for working hard why work hard.
It's nice to see that at university level the presumption is that all students are trying to cheat, such pro-active teaching methods we have adopted in this modern age. Maybe, just maybe, the people marking the essays should be able to spot blatant plagarism, should be aware of the key sources etc.
You need to take a look at the marketing of college now. At least here in the us, the slogan is "everyone needs to go to college", and that tends to be get out of HS, go to college, than work off your debit.
Most kids I know have no clue what they want to do, have no drive to learn the topic they are going for in college, and they're there to "get the degree."
I think its a glaring point about your business model, when instead of getting students who want to do your program, you just fill in the gaps, and come up with another solution for trying rein in kids who don't give a fuck to begin with.
I get that there are dishonest students out there, but is plagarism really widespread enough to warrant forcing every single student to upload every single paper to Turnitin? This reeks strongly of the entertainment industry's disturbing trend towards assuming every customer is a thief. The entertainment industry could possibly make the case that they're justified based on piracy numbers (not saying it'd be a strong case, mind you) but I can't imagine there's many university students who plagarize papers. At least not enough to justify treating the whole student body like cheaters.
On my course, we still have to hand everything in in hardcopy. This can prove very interesting, given that the uni has a central print server, connected to every printer on campus.
In theory, this means that you can print from any computer, and then log in to any printer in person to print it off. In practice, you can still print directly to any printer you want through active directory, and given that everyone uses the same five printers and ignore the rest, you can clog up the system quite easily.
Not that I would have anything to do with that though... Although, printing a 100mb .psd trollface to every printer on the network simultaneously seems to be the current 'in thing' these days. Think the record is about 3 hours spooling?
The whole point of Turnitin is that it's aggressive: at least at my uni we are informed that it flags up stuff for review that is then manually processed. Got a load of red flags and alarm bells? It just means your lecturer is going to go through and ensure it's all quotes and coincidence, then nothing bad will happen.
I didn't know students used turnitin directly, we all just submit to an internal system online which is then used by the lecturer.
Personally there's nothing wrong with using technology like this. Your uni makes it clear what's going on and if you get caught after being told there's an automated system that scans EVERYTHING, well you aren't the brightest bulb in the box...
"...the service can't check for plagiarism performed in an actual library..."
Personally, I'd be delighted if one of my students showed the initiative and industry required to locate a book, open it, read it, select relevant passages and then copy them out. I'd even be quite impressed if one or two of them blatantly copied and pasted from a website other than Wikipedia.
Unfortunately I'm sure my college isn't the only one where every time you walk past the library [sorry "Learning Resource Centre"] you see tumbleweed blowing through the empty aisles of books, while each computer is occupied with a student busily ROFLing and LOLing on FacePuke.
But who cares! —We've successfully turned education into a commercial enterprise in which courses will enrol literally anyone who bothers to turn up for interview, to avoid being shut down, institutions will retain non-attending students, so as not to lose the funding for them and lecturers will pass and award degrees to couldn't-care-less students, whose work would barely have been of O-level standard a couple of decades ago.
Anyone who thinks that occasional plagiarism is the biggest problem in education at the moment —you don't know the half of it!
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