turnitin.com: the end of the line?

For the past 5 or 6 years we’ve been using turnitin.com at AUC to curtail what was once a severe plagiarism problem here. There was some grumbling from the established faculty at the time (having to learn a new if very simple website) but I thought it was a brilliant solution. It enabled me to make a major crackdown early on, and in recent semesters the students seemed to be so terrified by it that they didn’t even try anything funny.

But now the students are slowly learning tricks to beat it. Not all of them are good tricks, but they’re becoming more sophisticated suddenly.

One problem many of us have is a disagreement with the writing faculty about the purpose of the software. They see it as a way to teach students what plagiarism is (not enough of that in the Egyptian high schools; plagiarism is rampant in this country), whereas the rest of the faculty (including me) sees it as a way to nail lawbreakers and send them to the dungeon.

As a result, some of these students are figuring out ways to run their philosophy papers through some sort of writing class access and jimmy the highlighted sentences just enough so that either: (a) the computer won’t catch it, or (b) they’ll have plausible deniability if it does.

In short, I think these intro classes are going to need to have all in-class essays now, which is most unfortunate. They’re starting to beat the key detection tool.