News
Plagiarism tool put to test at Metro.
By Tuyet Nguyen
nguytuye@mscd.edu
Plagiarism statistics
38 Percent of students who admitted to cut-and-paste internet plagiarism in 2002, according to a study by Rutgers University professor Donald
McCabe.
80 Percent of college-bound students who admit to cheating on schoolwork.
95 Percent of those college-bound students who cheat but never get caught.
90 Percent of students who believe cheaters are either never caught or have never been disciplined.
257 Chief student affairs officers across the country who beleve that colleges and universities have not addressed the cheating problem adequately.
Plagiarism doesn't pay, but in many Metro classrooms it will cost to detect.
Last spring, Metro tested Turnitin.com as part of a pilot program. Now it's one of many schools across the nation to use the service to discourage students from submitting work that is not their own.
The program is based on Turnitin's online database, which electronically compares a student's work against academic journals and scholastic references. The software also scans papers that are for sale on the Internet and essays that previously have been presented to Turnitin.
After a thorough examination, the Website then presents an Originality Report, which highlights text matches of more than eight words with "red flags" and links it to the original source.
"Before, when I just relied on my own ability to detect plagiarism I didn't catch very many plagiarists," said English professor Tat Sang So. "And in the last two semesters I've caught several times more than I did before."
So was in the initial pilot program launched last spring. He found the Website to be effective, easy to use, and much more versatile than initially thought. As a virtual storage for students' papers, So uses the site as an electronic file cabinet.
Not everyone has been as positive about Turnitin. Metro student James Garrett used the program last spring in one of her psychology courses and was unimpressed by how it was utilized in her class.
"I thought it was ridiculous," she said.
Garrett said students were told to submit papers to the Website and to wait for the Originality Report. If any papers came back with red flags, students were expected to update and change their work before turning in a final copy.
Turnitin step-by-step
1. Teachers and students submit documents through the Turnitin Website. Turnitin receives more than 20,000 papers per day.
2. Turnitin's servers compare submitted documents against vast proprietary databases using pattern-matching technology. Turnitin's database includes over 10 million student papers.
3. Turnitin's content databases contain millions of pages of books and journals and over 4.5 billion pages of the current and archived Internet. The database updates and adds to the Internet archive at a rate of 40 million pages per day.
4. The results are returned in the form of customized Originality Reports, in which any text matches found in the databases are highlighted and linked to their source. Originality Reports allow faculy members to make the final determination of whether plagiarism has occurred.
Source: Turnitin.com
But, Garrett said, the reports took too long and many did not receive them until after their papers were already due. She also complained of her teacher's inexperience with the program.
"I understand it was very new and maybe they didn't know how to train her very well," Garrett said, "but we were all very confused for basically the entire duration we were supposed to use it."
Despite her negative experience with Turnitin, Garrett believes that it will be helpful in curbing plagiarism.
Metro student Inayet Hadi, who has not been required to use Turnitin in any of his classes, is optimistic about the program and how it will affect the outside opinion of the quality of education at Metro.
"Metro seems to be lacking in a perception among the public that it's not academically rigorous," he said. "Metro needs to have this sort of foundation so its academics is not questioned."
Turnitin.com is also accessible though MetroConnect and students may use the Website on their own to inspect their papers. For now, only select departments and courses are using the Website. Any professor who is using the program is legally required to tell students and to have a statement about Turnitin included in the class syllabus.
"The threat that we might get caught plagiarizing will probably make kids pay more attention," Garett said.
