A software program called Turnitin is making life exceedingly difficult for student plagiarists via nparts
In 1980, a friend gave Martin Amis a new novel by a young American writer — Wild Oats, by Jacob Epstein, then just 24. Right away, Amis noticed certain similarities, “several phrases and similes,” lifted from his own first novel, The Rachel Papers, published a decade before.
If Epstein were a student, and Wild Oats not a novel but an essay, he would have been found out the moment he submitted the manuscript. What he’d appropriated from The Rachel Papers, even the material he’d nominally reworked or reworded, would be flagged, immediately, by computer software designed to identify plagiarism in academic work. A professor responsible for grading 300 term papers no longer needs to sniff out suspect sentences or paragraphs that seem vaguely out of place.
The database has been gathering new material for nearly 20 years now, and the company boasts on its website that its “unparalleled index” contains 929-million archived student papers — a Borgesian library of academic content that makes it extraordinarily difficult for would-be plagiarists to steal anything, anywhere. It’s hard to imagine the kind of obscure content a student would have to unearth for their pilfering to elude the sensors.
Read a few college term papers — or just read a few news articles on the web — and you will notice something that looks a lot like plagiarism but isn’t quite. It’s cliché. Turnitin’s own data points out that “the odds of writing the same 16 words in the same order by chance are one in a trillion.” The software is very good at catching instances where words are in the same order and it is virtually impossible, statistically, for it to be a coincidence. But the main function is more philosophical. Turnitin gets people thinking about what it means to plagiarize, and, the hope is, gives them a better understanding of how to write.
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