Mesa has been taking measures to prevent plagiarism for the past two years with
a subscription to Turnitin.com, the online plagiarism prevention site.
Mesa spends about $5,000 each year for the service that includes Peer Review,
GradeMark and GradeBook as well as plagiarism prevention features.
“I think it is worth the money we are charged since that price covers all Mesa
instructors and in the future I expect more may decide to use the program,” said
William Craft, Dean of Learning Resources and Technology. “However, if the price
were to go higher, or if only a few instructors used the program I would have to
reconsider.”
Every instructor at Mesa has the option of using Turnitin, but less than 30 use
it in their curriculum.
“It’s an extra effort to use the system,” Craft said. “Most teachers can
tell if a student has written his own paper–especially if the teacher gives in
class assignments as well. Also, if the student is copying from the Internet,
Google will find it for the teacher.”
The professors who do use Turnitin are impressed with its ability.
“Turnitin is extremely effective because it thoroughly searches the Internet as
well as its own collection of student papers,” said Biology Professor Paul
Sykes.
Journalism professor and Mesa Press advisor Janna Braun began using Turnitin
this Spring after she caught a student plagiarizing. Braun tested the site out
by submitting articles from online sites like Wikipedia, New York Times and
Yahoo! News. Turnitin gave the articles a grade of zero percent plagiarized.
Turnitin.com claims to search billions of current and archived Internet sources.
A representative for Turnitin said that they follow Wikipedia but their database
is only updated periodically, whereas Wikipedia changes constantly.
“I am a bit skeptical as I imagine that much of Wikipedia is not changing all
that quickly,” said Leslie Seiger, faculty service advisor for Turnitin.
Anar Brahmbhatt, faculty advisor for Turnitin, was also surprised to learn that
Turnitin didn’t catch materials from New York Times and Yahoo.
“Turnitin.com has a very extensive database,” Brahmbhatt said. “However, it does not
claim that it can catch all forms of plagiarism. They are constantly working to
improve their services and expand their databases.”
Sykes said that Turnitin can’t catch all plagiarism, but it is more effective than previous methods of trying to catch plagiarism.
“I guess the tool isn’t perfect, but then again neither is an instructors search
without Turnitin,” said Sykes. “In the past, most instructors would only go
to the library and search for plagiarism if something looked really suspicious.”
Craft said that Turnitin does not check everything on the Internet or proprietary databases.
“They (Turnitin) basically cover the Internet, various popular databases, and a large collection of already submitted student papers,” said Craft.
Seiger said that she can usually tell which written assignments are plagiarized by the way students write.
“I don’t really need Turnitin to detect plagiarism,” Seiger said. “I mostly use Turnitin to discourage plagiarism and to save time documenting if it does occur.”
Dean Craft said that teachers don’t use Turnitin to necessarily catch plagiarism, but rather to prevent it by helping to teach students what plagiarism is.
Turnitin allows Mesa teachers to check for plagiarism without having to search on the Internet for plagiarized students.
“I presently use Turnitin to assist me in detecting plagiarism and in providing a real threat that all papers will be scrutinized,” said Sykes.