Many students have taken a class that now requires them to turn a paper into turnitin.com, which is an anti-plagiarism web-site. Recently according to Dennis Carter of e-school news, Turnitin.com received news that they case against them involving copyright infringement would be thrown out, because copyright infringement is allowed for news reporting, comment, and teaching. The judge Hilton, stated that although turnitin turns a profit, that they public benefit justified a profit.
Turnitin.com compares student’s work to other submissions and judges whether or not the paper is plagiarized based on percentage of likelihood. Over 7000 school institutions are using this web-site in the hopes of preventing kids from cheating. The widely available papers online has spurred websites such as turnitin.com to become increasingly popular to educators.
I wouldn’t normally mind these anti-plagiarism sites except that one is given no credit for their work. I’m sure most people in this class have recycled a paper at least once in their lives, and although the work is your own, if the original paper is on this site you could get busted for Plagiarism. Now when I say recycle a paper, I do not mean print off two copies and hand it in to two different professors. You would change the paper a little bit, but one might not change the entire paper. These unchanged parts would surely raise a few flags. It is my firm opinion that you cannot plagiarize yourself. It is ok to turn in the same paper if you ask your professor first, is what is taught in Library skills class. However, what if you have two similar paper topics, that one paper can answer, or one paper with slight modifications would answer. Chances are if you use the old paper and revise it, it will be stronger than if you started a new one from scratch.
With the rise of internet plagiarism I’m not surprised that sites like these are gaining popularity. I’m not overly worried about the web-site itself. I just think kids should be given credit or compensation for having a site use their papers. If this was a not-for-profit then this whole mess would not be of issue to me. But someone is making a lot of money on students work.
2 comments:
I agree with Pat with it comes to “recycling” a paper. I think that this is understandable and perfectly normal to do. I don’t understand how it is plagiarism if it is your own work? I think that if you are going to use a paper more than once, then yes, you should change some things, however, I don’t think you should be penalized or thrown out of school for using YOUR own paper more than once. I like the idea of turnitin.com, I think it is a very beneficial website and students do indeed tend to get lazy and use other people’s work. I highly disagree with students using other peoples work, rather than their own, this is a very sore subject in schools today. Turnitin.com is a great way of preventing this from happening. Students should not be credited for work that is not their own. I also agree with Pat when he says that kids should be credited for having a website use their paper, it is their work after all.
Turnitin.com does sound like a good website for teachers. After about three papers, most teachers can tell the students' papers apart. Then one student (a weaker writer) sounds too perfect. The teacher can check on Turnitin.com, and find it's a paper from a college student three years ago.
I do agree with this website. The way the interent is now (and has been), it is so easy to find a better paper than you can write. My professor in high school warned me about Plagerism.com (or something like this) when we handed in our huge research paper at the end of the year. He told us, even the best kids actually did cheat without proper MLA format. One kid I knew actually failed the class...The web does need a way to stop cheating. This website sounds like the perfect tool for teachers in the 21st century.
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