Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Turnitin: I'm a plagiarizer?

Today was the first time I've used Turnitin. I submitted a paper I wrote to see how it would fair under Turnitin's scrutiny. In my paper, I cited my sources, paraphrased, and used quotation marks. Yet Turnitin said that 21% of my paper was similar to other works. When I looked at the passages marked as similar and compared them to the originals, I noticed a few things...

I had never used (or even seen) the sources/papers to which my paper had similarities. Many of them were student papers submitted to Turnitin.

If I quoted a passage and a writer in the Turnitin database had also cited the same passage, my passage was flagged even though I had used quotation marks and cited properly. So if another writer and I used the same source and both decided to quote the same section, I get flagged as a possible plagiarizer.

Sections of the citations on my reference list were flagged because other papers in the database contained those same reference citations.

On the similarity report, I can exclude quotations and bibliography. Doing that decreases my paper to 4% similarity.

I can see a lot of value to using Turnitin or a similar service. However, there would need to be substantial (and repeated) training for instructors who use it so that they can accurately interpret the similarity reports. I'd hate to have failed my paper because 21% of it was similar to other works (including reference pages).

5 comments:

KJJ said...

This reminds me a bit of when I was teaching French and online translators were considered the "best thing ever" by students who didn't know better.

These kinds of aids are helpful but far from perfect. The user still has to have the knowledge to be able to interpret and correct the results.

Thanks for being a guinea pig.

-Krista

Amy Springer said...

This is not good..

Jan said...

Chandra, can I share your experience in an email (copy/paste blog post) with my faculty? i think it would be good for them to read it.

Chandra said...

Jan, you may want to summarize my experiences instead of doing a copy/paste. I tend to point out all the negatives even when something is actually pretty good; my post didn't reflect the upsides of Turnitin. If we do adopt this service and if you'd like to summarize my experience as a way to emphasize what faculty members should watch for, go ahead. But please don't let my Eeyore perspective color your impressions.

Beth said...

This is somewhat startling to me, I didn't realize how the service worked, good investigative work,
Thanks Chandra