Turnitin - Advantages and Disadvantages

Turnitin

A more detailed look into this system...

Just doing a quick recap, so far, we have looked at what plagiarism is, some facts and statistics to show that we are talking about something that is important, and in the last post we introduced what anti-plagiarism software is and we briefly discussed a few details about Turnitin. In this post, I will be assessing the advantages and disadvantages of using Turnitin. Before I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Turnitin, I will first discuss how it works.

How does Turnitin work?

Schools, high schools and universities, subscribe to Turnitin services as a resource that instructors can use to evaluate work. It is used in courses that have a lot of written assignments, like writing, history, philosophy, etc. When Turnitin is used in a class, students will submit their papers to a Turnitin link through blackboard, or sites similar to blackboard. Turnitin will then give the paper a score based off of the amount of identical phrases that match with articles in their database.

 Advantages

The advantages that are listed comes from the view of someone who would purchase Turnitin services (an institution, instructor, or student). It should also be noted that these advantages were found in two articles produced by Turnitin. Nonetheless, these advantages include, but are not limited to the following:

• It makes spotting plagiarism easy
• It has an ever-growing database
• It reduces grading time
• It increases student engagement
• It improves the quality of feedback
• It provides other services like PeerCheck, GradeCheck, and WriteChek which help give more meaningful feedback on papers
• It provides free training on how to use its software

Disadvantages

There has been a lot of unease and legal issues regarding Turnitin. The legal issues stem from Turnitin saving the student paper's that are submitted to it, regardless of having the rights to it or not. The disadvantages were found in an article by Luke Arnott (2009) and Bensal, Miraflores, and Tan (2013). These disadvantages include:

• Essays receiving high plagiarism rating, with proper citation, due to long quotes.
• It cannot prompt students to cite information that needs credibility
• It cannot check citation styles (APA, MLA, etc.)
• It confuses some original thoughts that are similar to thoughts in its database and labels it as plagiarism 

Both of the critiques contended that Turnitin cannot fully replace grading papers but can be instrumental in the grading process if some human interpretation is coupled with it.

In the next two posts, I will be posting things that will help students avoid plagiarizing any of their work. Specifically, I will discuss anti-plagiarism software that students can use to detect plagiarism in their own works, and I will provide a brief introduction into how to manage references and some tools to help do this.

SOURCES

https://suite.io/luke-arnott/1pzb20r (Arnott, 2009)


http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/421-general/2034-survey-finds-turnitin-saves-time-and-improves-feedback

7 Things Educators Should Know About Turnitin


Plagiarism: Should we Turnitin? (Bensal, Miraflores, and Tan, 2013)