Thu, 09 Mar 2006
Turnitin.com is a service schools can use
to detect plagiarism. Students submit their papers to turnitin.com, in MS Word
format, I guess, and it analyses the text for plagiarism. Here's how the
company describes
it:
The industry's most advanced search technology that checks papers against our
in-house copies of both current and archived internet content and our
proprietary database of millions of previously submitted student papers.
My Economics
professor told us an amusing story this morning about turnitin.com. She is
on a committee that was evaluating using the service. Going through a demo of
the service while on the phone with a rep from the company, she asked what
happens if the student hides nonsensical characters within the text by
replacing whitespace with characters in a white font. She went ahead and tried
it with the sample plagiarized poem the company provided. Lo and behold, the
poem was reported as not being plagiarized. Despite one professor's continued
desire to use this $5,000 service, the committee opted not to.
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