I've never been comfortable with forcing students to turn their papers in to this commercial operation. The company makes money from the intellectual property of students who are assumed to be cheaters. Heck, even if the assumption is right, Unersities are the last entities that should be so cavalierly disregarding intellectual property rights. Washington Post article is here. There's also a discussion on Slashdot. Having caught plenty of plagiarized papers by reading them, and sometimes googling sentences from them, I have to think that this sort of shortcut is perhaps not completely useful.
As the UMN has a license for turnitin, we can test it pretty easily. Send some text you wrote and see the "percent likely plagiarized" score. Oh wait, is testing the engine forbidden under the terms of use?
Posted by duver001 at September 25, 2006 10:17 AM | TrackBack