Coerced crowdsourcing for students: Turnitin.com

By: Michael Silberman | December 7, 2008

My cousin Jake is a sophomore in high school in Westchester County, New York. At one point during our family's Thanksgiving (and amidst an endless string of "how's school!?" questions that I don't miss at all), Jake casually referenced an interesting site called www.turnitin.com.

Jake and his fellow classmates are required to upload their essays and term papers to turnitin.com instead of submitting a hard copy to their teachers. Intrigued by how times have changed since we had to walk uphill to school both ways, I checked out the site.

Here's how it works: The site scans the uploaded text and checks for "originality" -- i.e. possible plagarism -- by matching it against a massive database of content. In addition to collecting and organizing the students' papers, the teacher receives a "similarity" index for each work, showing the percentage of words in the uploaded paper that are word-for-word matches (unoriginal content) and can then look to see if the student cited other sources properly.

Sounds like a smart use of technology, until you realize that the database didn't build itself. Millions of students did -- for free! According to the site's own promotional materials (PDF), "Turnitin looks for matches in over 9.5 billion pages of indexed web content, over 60 million papers in the student paper archive, and over 10,000 professional, academic and commercial journals and publications."

It's not entirely clear to me if Jake's use of turnitin.com is a formal requirement or an informal teacher request that has now become the norm. Either way, I'm astonished that it's tolerated by students because Turnitin.com clearly profits off of the students' work. Which would be fine if either (a) the students were compensated for helping to build turnitin.com's content database and business or (b) the students' use of turnitin.com were optional.

Until I'm proven wrong about all of this (and I hope I am) or until turnitin.com starts paying students for their submissions, I encourage students eveywhere to boycott the site's required use in classrooms or at least to make their teachers use the turnitin.com system on their own time.

Categories:
IMHO

Legacy Comments

Ben Buckman — Mon, 12/08/2008 - 23:15

Turnitin was sued last year and won the suit, unfortunately.

Henri makembe (not verified) — Wed, 12/10/2008 - 10:33

I've been using Turnitin as part of my MBA program. We are not forced to use but we are encouraged to use it to make sure that our references and citations are done correctly. I don't think the product is actually effective. I have not had a paper with less than 30% match, but none my professors have ever accused me of plagiarizing. I think it's an easy to scare students from plagiarism and nothing more. I do like their business model tho.

assignment writing (not verified) — Thu, 02/19/2009 - 01:23

I like Turnitin. When I don't have access to it, I have taken to "Googling" (yes, I cap the "G" for brand names even when "verbed")selected lines of an essay to make sure the plagiarism wasn't blatant. Turnitin is a lot more accurate and sophisticated

coursework (not verified) — Thu, 02/19/2009 - 01:26

I'm not a proponent of Turnitin, but I have wanted to hear how others at different levels of academe feel about it.

Management Thesis (not verified) — Thu, 03/05/2009 - 07:45

I have not had a paper with less than 30% match, but none my professors have ever accused me of plagiarizing.

anna (not verified) — Fri, 05/29/2009 - 05:47

i'm studying in scotland and i have to use turnitin every time when i submit my essay. honestly i'm not happy about that, because i know how to write essays and i do not plagiarize others works. so why someone can stored my essays without copyrights ?!?...and so many times it's happen that turnitin match MY OWN words with other people works, even when subject was extremely different...

Home Security (not verified) — Tue, 06/16/2009 - 03:50

I read your blog with my personal attention. On the top you write about your friend Jake that his family is worry about his residence because he is student and live in other city that far away from his family. He should install some security equipments for his security. After then his family have a patience to hear about his security.

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