I have a special interest in catching cheaters, probably because I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 18 years writing test questions and other exercises that college students answer and get graded on, and also because I had to deal with cheating a few times when I taught political science courses at Butte College and Shasta College.
So I read with great interest an article about the service Turnitin and how college admissions programs are using it to screen applicants for plagiarism:
It wasn’t that hard for admissions officers for the M.B.A. program at Pennsylvania State University to figure out that they had a plagiarism problem this year. One of the topics for application essays referenced the business school’s idea of “principled leadership.” Some applicants apparently Googled the term and came up with an article about the concept in a publication of a business school association. Thirty applicants submitted essays that either lifted many passages straight from the article or substantially paraphrased the article without appropriate attribution.
Of course, Turnitin is most commonly used by college instructors to see if students have cheated on term papers and other assignments.
What do you think of using Turnitin? Have you personally used it? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
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