Turnitin and the Debate over Anti-Plagiarism Software (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Turnitin and the Debate over Anti-Plagiarism Software (2014)

npr.org

14 pointsEndXA28 comments

My university used turnitin (I assume it still does), largely to check journal paper submissions and theses.

This was pretty frustrating, as my undergraduate thesis had some publishable work in it. When I reformatted the thesis up so that it would fit the standards of a journal, I still ended up getting a pretty high match...to my own work (the thesis). I ended up rewording as much of the paper as I could, but I couldn't get the %match below whatever the threshold was. Eventually my adviser said "ok, that's good enough" because he could see that I was being accused of plagiarism against myself.

Obviously, there's a big problem with procedures in your university. The software did it job well finding what it should find, then a human should have looked at what it is, instead of you doing meaningless work of chasing lower match score.

It seems to fit in a larger anti-pattern of educational institutions and administrative ass-covering by using "objective" rules and scores to disguard any judgement even when it is obviously and hillariously wrong.

See Zero Tolerance for another example. I snark that the best antidote to this lack of discretion is to fire the management and replace them with a minimium wage position if they won't exercise any thought.

I had to appeal about half my submissions to my university, because they were flagged for plagiarism against... Myself.

Turnitin seemed great at picking up my patterns of speech and common explanations I needed to make time and time again.

Turnitin was very annoying to use back in my college days (roughly around when this article was published). So many mislabels of content being plagiarized even when I'd properly quoted/cited anything I added. It would even label sentences or phrases that are fairly common to communicate with as being copied from the internet.

Maybe it's improved since I graduated, but it definitely wasn't pleasant to use.

This has been my overall experience with it since it's inception. They have had years to improve, but just like Blackboard, they failed.

There was a push when I was in college to extend it to programming assignments, which at the time it was monumentally poorly suited to. It turns out there's only so many unique ways first years can write hello world in Java, or the Car make/model getters/setters. It also was prone to pull lines out of context like "Why yes, someone has written for(int i = 0; i < 100; i++) before".

By second year using it for code was abandoned as a failed experiment, thankfully.

Even for essays, it was quite fond of flagging the entire references section by finding each reference individually somewhere else.

Turnitin is was and always will be complete FUD. Universities use it to pretend like they care about plagiarism, while turning the other cheek when large groups of international students are caught blatantly cheating.

Is this a common occurence? My classmate was complaining to me back when I was in uni about how a group of students from her ethnic group were not punished when they were caught cheating and so did a PhD student about a similar event.

There are ways around turnitin... like using similar-looking unicode characters.

I wouldn't blame a particular ethnic group, I think its purely due to the economics of international students paying 2x or more in tuition compared to other groups. At my school international students were paying 70k-80k a year, not to mention their contributions to the local economy in terms of rent, food, cars, etc.

Likely universities always want to keep statistics of plagiarism, drop-outs, and graduation rates, at certain levels as well.

I had the displeasure of using turnitin for a software engineering college course semi-recently (Long after this article was written).

It was a nasty mess that would scream at you whenever you quoted a source or referenced something and would get snagged on small commonly used interjections ALL THE TIME.

Some people ITT are saying how it's still up to the teacher's discretion whether you've plagiarised or not ...NOPE!

At the college I went to (and this seems to be a common experience looking at the thread) there were hard limits of how much it could flag before you had to resubmit. What a joke.

The teachers were nice and would let it slip if it was really stupid but it still was russian roulette any time I had to submit something. NOT FUN.

> The fact that anti-plagiarism software can't tell the difference between accidental and intentional plagiarism is just one reason that Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University, is not a fan. Here's another reason: "The use of a plagiarism-detecting service implicitly positions teachers and students in an adversarial position," Howard says.

I don't understand this objection at all. It's just a tool. It tells the teacher "this was plagiarized". It's then up to the teacher to ascertain the moral character of the plagiarism, i.e. if it was intentional or not.

> I don't understand this objection at all.

They feel policing plagiarism turns them into a parking warden or a cop, when they want to be more like a coach, older student or parent.

I assume that's important, if you're hoping to have productive exploratory discussions in class, rather than the classic take-notes-in-silence type lecture.

If you aren't going to police plagiarism why are you assigning essays at all though?

To facilitate learning ofc. Not using software to check for plagiarism, isn't going to invalidate the use of essay work in learning.

My point is that using software is just a consequence of the desire to check for plagiarism. Your options are:

1. Check for plagiarism poorly by hand.

2. Check for plagiarism thoroughly with software

3. Don't check for plagiarism at all.

Option 1 I don't understand at all, and option 3 seems to negate the purpose of assigning essays.

“Police” being the verb in this situation is exactly the problem, just like with actual crime. Like another comment mentioned, this calls more for coaching or mentorship than rule-enforcement and punishment. Aside: I think we should stop using the word “police” for things that are not law-enforcers/punishers.

But that is completely orthogonal to the issue of detection. In order to coach/mentor correctly, you need to know what it is your students are doing. It's still up to the teacher how they respond to plagiarism. But if you don't even know your students are plagiarizing, you're hardly in a position to coach them.

> They feel policing plagiarism turns them into a parking warden or a cop, when they want to be more like a coach, older student or parent.

This is new, then. When I was in college, plagiarism was treated as serious academic malpractice, practically on the level of a crime. The gravity of the offense, as well as the ease with which it can be committed, was emphasized. If you quote even a few words from a source without proper attribution (typically as dictated by the MLA), you are plagiarizing. This was drilled into our heads.

It's "just a tool", but it can be misused by poor teachers and administrators, and it's a lot easier to plausibly misuse (create a rule where everyone who scores more than X% fails) than to use well.

I’m sure that’s true, but if you have poor teachers or poor administrative policies/systems then you have a much bigger problem.

As a lecturer that has used TurnItIn (because it was an automated part of electronic submission), I would have to say that anyone who just looks at the score is not actually using it. TurnItIn marks up the submitted essay so while grading it I can see exactly where the student has cited other work and where they might be claiming copy/pasted text as their own. I don’t think it should be used for screening essays such that they aren’t actually marked at all, after all that would mean the educator wasn’t doing the work they’re paid for and they wouldn’t be able to give feedback to the student.

I’m not even saying it’s good at it’s job, but in the end anything can be misused so we have to keep it in perspective.

Ahhhh, turnitin and company. The majority of students just want their damn degree and so the majority of students use translation plagiarism, heavy rephrasing and other simple tricks to create yet another useless paper / thesis no one will ever read. If they even write it themselves...

I am sorry for the coming generations that have to deal with more and more of this nonsense but I am optimistic that turnitin will eventually get so clogged up content, that essentially everything becomes a plagiate.

Well GPT-3 seems to be capable of producing at least C level essays...so how many weeks are we away from AI just infinitely generating these things?

This software was absolutely hated by the students. Not only is it difficult to use for some who have trouble with technology, but it would often score a persons paper with wildly inaccurate remarks to the point that the instructor accused the person of cheating. It made many students cry.

Edit: I'm not sure why my comments are coming up as "dead" but only when logged out. Seems like I am shadowbannned, for some odd reason. Might have to make a new account?

You have slightly negative karma. If you make good comments or submissions so that you collect karma or vouches from other users then the situation will improve. I would not encourage you to make a new account since the newness of an account seems to count against it.

Good to know thanks

I returned to university recently after 30 years to do a masters degree, and was shocked when a lecturer told me that he had to go to a plagiarism hearing regarding 10% of the students on the course. I'm beginning to realise that "plagiarism" may not mean the same thing it meant in 1988.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com