tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66337494890595625872024-02-20T02:07:35.359-08:00How to Fool Turnitin?How to fool turnitin?http://www.blogger.com/profile/07206646912466814044noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6633749489059562587.post-30989726748287570672011-04-12T05:08:00.000-07:002011-04-12T05:08:13.383-07:00Limitations to Turnitin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="highlightedSearchTerm"></span><div class="" id="parent-fieldname-text"><i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> has some very serious limitations <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> its ability <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> fully detect plagiarism. For one thing, <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> can only detect the most blatantly copied text. It cannot detect cleverly paraphrased passages, or copied text that has been vastly altered by the student’s use of a thesaurus. It is also ineffective for detecting works that have been written by another student, person or a “ghost writer,” unless more than one student submits the paper. <i><span style="color: black;"><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></span></i><span style="color: black;"> cannot distinguish between text that has been properly quoted and cited and text that has not. Subsequently, it returns an inaccurate originality report. <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> often returns a report of unoriginality for paper headers, and bibliographies. Therefore, the initial plagiarism percentage rating cannot be used as a trustworthy indication of the degree of plagiarism. Using an example from my course: one student posted a paper that received an initial score of 64% plagiarized, but upon inspecting the paper I saw the majority of the matches came from properly quoted material and the references cited section. After checking the accuracy of the citations and references, I excluded them from the match and the paper returned a score of two percent. Additionally, many students participate in online forums that s<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>re the comments in a database and display them in a thread. Often, <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> will incorrectly match disparate and disjointed sections of that thread <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> the students’ papers, or will return a plagiarism report for students who are actually quoting themselves. Further, there are several web sites that offer effective methods of circumventing the plagiarism detection of <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i>. One site described <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">how</span> <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> use the macros function in Microsoft Word <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> “<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">fool</span>” the service. For example, the student could submit a plagiarized paper in which every letter ‘a’ is accompanied by a tilde, i.e., ‘a~.’ The <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> service would fail <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> detect the plagiarism since the original documents do not contain the tildes. Then the student could submit the same paper <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> the professor with the macros enabled that would instantly switch the ‘a~’ <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> an ‘a’ upon opening the document. In such an instance, the instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>r would never see the tildes and relying upon the originality report returned by <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i>, would accept the paper as an original. Further, knowing that there are many anti-plagiarism robots crawling the web, so-called “cheat sites” or “essay mills” that sell term papers outright do not keep the essays in a searchable database. Therefore, papers purchased from such sites could return false reports of originality. Along these same lines, a webmaster could post a “robots.txt” file in the root folder of their websites, which would prevent the “<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span>Bot” from crawling and caching the contents of their web site(s). Another less-pressing concern is</span><span style="color: #333333;"> that since it is entirely web-based, if your network experiences connectivity problems, the service would not be available until such issues are resolved. More importantly, the use of <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> could compromise the instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>r’s own grading criteria. Upon reading a paper, an instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>r might judge it <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> be original and give it a high mark. <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">How</span>ever, after submitting the paper <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> and viewing the originality report, the instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>r would most likely lower the grade and even confront the student. Additionally, using the service places an emphasis on policing student behavior and has the ability <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> shift the instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>r’s attention away from teaching good writing skills and ways <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> avoid plagiarism. Although I am certain that there are numerous other pitfalls <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> using <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i>, one of the most serious problems may be found in the way instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>rs use it. It is a very dangerous practice <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> judge a paper by the originality report alone, although that is <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">how</span> many instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>rs have utilized the service. By reading a hard copy of the paper (on which they make their corrections and edits) and relying on the originality report alone <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> assure the absence of plagiarism the instruc<span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span>r treads on very thin ice. Finally, I found <i><span class="highlightedSearchTerm">Turnitin</span></i> <span class="highlightedSearchTerm">to</span> be a very contentious service which walks a balancing beam between fair and legal use of student papers and infringements on the students’ right. I will explore the implications of this in part two of this report.</span></div></div>How to fool turnitin?http://www.blogger.com/profile/07206646912466814044noreply@blogger.com0