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Turnitin

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Turnitin
Type of businessSubsidiary
Type of site
OnlineSaaSeditor
Founded1998
Headquarters2101 Webster Street Suite 1800Oakland,California 94612,
United States
Area servedWorldwide
IndustryEducation
ParentAdvance Publications
URLturnitin.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationYes
Users
  • 30M+ students
  • (15,000 institutions)
Content licence
Proprietary
Location of Turnitin's Oakland office

Turnitin(stylized asturnitin) is an Internet-basedsimilarity detectionservice run by the American company Turnitin, LLC, asubsidiaryofAdvance Publications.

Founded in 1998, it sells its licenses to universities and high schools who then use thesoftware as a service(SaaS) website to check submitted documents against its database and the content of other websites with the aim of identifyingplagiarism.Results can identify similarities with existing sources and can also be used informative assessmentto help students learn to avoid plagiarism and improve their writing.[citation needed]

Students may be required to submit work to Turnitin as a requirement of taking a certain course or class. The software has been a source of controversy, with some students refusing to submit, arguing that requiring submission implies apresumption of guilt.Some critics have alleged that use of thisproprietary softwareviolates educationalprivacyas well as internationalintellectual-propertylaws, and exploits students' works for commercial purposes by permanently storing them in Turnitin's privately helddatabase.[1]

Turnitin, LLC also runs the informational website plagiarism.org and offers a similar plagiarism-detection service for newspaper editors and book and magazine publishers callediThenticate.Other tools included with the Turnitinsuiteare GradeMark (online grading andcorrective feedback) and PeerMark (student peer-review service).

In the UK, the service is supported and promoted byJISCas 'Plagiarism Detection Service Turnitin UK'. The Service is operated by iParadigms, in conjunction with Northumbria Learning, the European reseller of the Service.[2]

Company history

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In March 2019,Advance Publicationsacquired Turnitin, LLC forUS$1.75 billion.[3]

In 2021, Turnitin acquired competing software company, Ouriginal, itself the result of a merger between Urkund andPlagScan.[4]

Functionality

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The Turnitin software checks for potentially unoriginal content by comparing submitted papers to several databases using a proprietaryalgorithm.It scans its own databases and also has licensing agreements with large academic proprietary databases.

Artificial Intelligence Content Detection

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In early 2023, Turnitin released a feature that aims to detect content generated by artificial intelligence applications likeChatGPT,however the accuracy ofAI content detectionremains a topic of debate.[5]

Later that year, some schools have disabled Turnitin'sAI detectionsoftware due to concerns that, like all other AI detection tools,[6]the software is not entirely accurate.[7][8]Concerns arose after cases were brought with students alleging Turnitin falsely accused them of using AI.[9][10]This has happened when students use the grammar-correcting softwareGrammarly,which is recommended for student use by many schools.[11][12][13]Turnitin says that they believe about 1% of the papers they flag as AI-written were actually written by humans, and that a much higher rate is generated by AI but not flagged.[6][14]

Student-paper database

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The essays submitted by students are stored in a database used to check for plagiarism. This prevents one student from using another student's paper, by identifying matching text between papers. In addition to student papers, the database contains a copy of the publicly accessible Internet, with the company using aweb crawlerto continually add content to Turnitin's archive. It also contains commercial and/or copyrighted pages from books, newspapers, and journals.

Classroom integration

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If requested by teachers, students can upload their papers directly to the service, for teachers to access them there. Teachers may also submit student papers to Turnitin.com as individual files, by bulk upload, or as aZIPfile. Teachers can further set assignment-analysis options so that students can review the system's "originality reports" before they finalize their submission. A peer-review option is also available.

Somevirtual learning environmentscan be configured to support Turnitin, so that student assignments can be automatically submitted for analysis.Blackboard,Moodle,ANGEL,Instructure,Desire2Learn,Pearson Learning Studio,Sakai,andStudywizintegrate in some way with the software.[15]

Admissions applications

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In 2019, Turnitin began analyzing admissions application materials through a partner software,Kira Talent.[16]

Reception

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Privacy

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TheStudent UnionatDalhousie Universityhas criticized the use of Turnitin at Canadian universities because the American government may be able to access the submitted papers and personal information in the database under theUSA PATRIOT Act.[17]Mount Saint Vincent Universitybecame the first Canadian university to ban Turnitin's service partly because of implications of the Act.[18][19]

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Lawyers for the company claim that student work is covered under the theory of implied license to evaluate, since it would be pointless to write the essays if they were not meant to be graded. That implied license, the lawyers argue, thus grants Turnitin permission to copy, reproduce and preserve the works. The company's lawyers further claim that dissertations andthesesalso carry with them an implied permission to archive in a publicly accessible collection such as a university library.[20]

University of Minnesota Law Schoolprofessor Dan Burk countered that the company's use of the papers may not meet the fair-use test for several reasons:

  • The company copies the entire paper, not just a portion
  • Students' work is often original, interpretive and creative rather than just a compilation of established facts
  • Turnitin is a commercial enterprise[21]

When a group of students filed suit against Turnitin on that basis, inVanderhye et al. v. iParadigms LLC,the district court found the practice fell withinfair use;on appeal, theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuitaffirmed.[22]

Presumption of guilt

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Some students argue that requiring them to submit papers to Turnitin creates apresumption of guilt,which may violate scholastic disciplinary codes and applicable local laws and judicial practice. Some teachers and professors support this argument when attempting to discourage schools from using Turnitin.[23][19]

WriteCheck

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iParadigms, the company that once owned Turnitin, ran another commercial website called WriteCheck. On this website, students paid a fee to have a paper tested against the database used by Turnitin to determine whether or not that paper would be detected as plagiarism when the student submitted that paper to the Turnitin website. It was announced that the WriteCheck product was being withdrawn in 2020 with no new subscriptions being accepted after November 2019.[24]The economistAlex Tabarrokhas complained that Turnitin's systems "are warlords who are arming both sides in this plagiarism war".[25]The website is no longer active.

Litigation

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In one well-publicized dispute over mandatory Turnitin submissions, Jesse Rosenfeld, a student atMcGill Universitydeclined, in 2004, to submit his academic work to Turnitin. The University Senate eventually ruled that Rosenfeld's assignments were to be graded without using the service.[26]The following year, another McGill student, Denise Brunsdon, refused to submit her assignment to Turnitin.com and won a similar ruling from the Senate Committee on Student Grievances.[27]

In 2006, the Senate atMount Saint Vincent Universityin Nova Scotia prohibited the submission of students' academic work to Turnitin.com and any software that requires students' work to become part of an external database where other parties might have access to it.[19]This decision was granted after the students' union alerted the university community of their legal and privacy concerns associated with the use of Turnitin.com and other anti-plagiarism devices that profit from students' academic work. This was the first campus-wide ban of its kind in Canada,[28]following decisions byPrinceton,Harvard,YaleandStanfordnot to use Turnitin.[29]

AtToronto Metropolitan Universityin Toronto, students may decide whether to submit their work to Turnitin.com or make alternate arrangements with an instructor.[30] Similar policies are in place atBrock UniversityinSaint Catharines.[31]

On March 27, 2007, with the help of an intellectual property attorney, two students fromMcLean High SchoolinVirginia(with assistance from the Committee For Students' Rights) and two students attendingDesert Vista High SchoolinPhoenix, Arizona,filed suit inUnited States Circuit Court(Eastern District, Alexandria Division) alleging copyright infringement by iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company.[32]Nearly a year later, Judge Claude M. Hilton grantedsummary judgmenton the students' complaint in favor of iParadigms/Turnitin,[33]because they had accepted theclick-wrap agreementon the Turnitin website. The students appealed the ruling,[34]and in 2009, theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuitaffirmed Judge Hilton's judgment in favor of iParadigms/Turnitin.[35]

Flaws

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Ad hoc encodings, fonts and text representation

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Severalflawsandbugsin the Turnitin plagiarism detection software have been documented inscientific literature.[36]In particular, Turnitin has been proven to bevulnerableto

  1. ad hoctext encodings,
  2. rearrangedglyphsin acomputer font,
  3. text replaced withBézier curvesrepresenting its shape.

Automated paraphrasing

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Another study[37]showed that Turnitin failed to detect text produced by popular free Internet-basedparaphrasingtools. Besides, more sophisticatedmachine learningtechniques, such asautomated paraphrasing,can produce natural and expressive text, which is virtually impossible for Turnitin to detect. Also,article spinningwas not recognized by Turnitin. Asked about the situation, the then vice president of marketing at Turnitin Chris Harrick said that the company was "working on a solution", but it was "not a big concern" because in his opinion "the quality of these tools is pretty poor".[38]

Turnitin's response

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Several years later, Turnitin published an article titled "Can students trick Turnitin? Some students believe that they can 'beat' Turnitin by employing various tactics".[39]The company denied any technical issues and said that "the authors of these 'tricks' are mostlyessay mills."The article then listed a few possible" tricks "and how Turnitin intended to take care of them, without mentioning scientific literature, technicaltreatisesor examples ofsource code.

Further criticism

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The Italian scholarMichele Cortelazzo[it],professor oflinguisticswho also studiescopyright attributionandsimilarity between texts,[40]noted that, ironically, it is impossible to tell if Turnitin'ssource codehas been plagiarized from other sources, because it is notopen source.[41]For the same reason, it is unknown whatscientific methodologies,if any, Turnitin uses to assess papers.[41]

In 2009, a group of researchers fromTexas Tech Universityreported that many of the instances of "non-originality" that Turnitin finds are not plagiarism but the use ofjargon,coursetermsorphrasesthat appeared for legitimate reasons. For example, the researchers found high percentages of flagged material in the topic terms of papers (e.g. "global warming") or" topic phrases ", which they defined as the paper topic with a few words added (e.g." the prevalence ofchildhood obesitycontinues to rise ").[42]

Turnitin was also criticized for payingpanelistsatconferenceson education and writing.[42]

See also

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References

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  1. ^"A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin".hybridpedagogy.org.June 15, 2017.RetrievedJanuary 4,2021.
  2. ^"Turnitin UK 2021-2022"(PDF).University of Bristol.
  3. ^Korn, Melissa (March 6, 2019)."Advance Publications to Buy Plagiarism-Scanning Company Turnitin for Nearly $1.75 Billion".Wall Street Journal.
  4. ^"CEO's statement on Ouriginal's acquisition by Turnitin, November 30, 2021".November 30, 2021.
  5. ^Fowler, Geoffrey A. (April 3, 2023)."We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student".The Washington Post.
  6. ^ab"Can Using a Grammar Checker Set Off AI-Detection Software?".EdSurge.April 4, 2024.RetrievedApril 25,2024.
  7. ^Quach, Katyanna."Some universities reject Turnitin's AI-writing detector".www.theregister.com.RetrievedNovember 23,2023.
  8. ^"University removes AI detection feature from Turnitin".The Hawk Newspaper.October 4, 2023.RetrievedNovember 23,2023.
  9. ^Klee, Miles (June 6, 2023)."She Was Falsely Accused of Cheating With AI -- And She Won't Be the Last".Rolling Stone.RetrievedNovember 23,2023.
  10. ^Young, Jeffrey R. (April 4, 2024)."What happened after this college student's paper was falsely flagged for AI use after using Grammarly".Fast Company.
  11. ^Menezes, Damita (March 4, 2024)."Student fights academic probation for using Grammarly".The Hill.RetrievedApril 25,2024.
  12. ^Steere, Elizabeth."The Trouble With AI Writing Detection".Inside Higher Ed.RetrievedApril 25,2024.
  13. ^Leoffler, Kim (February 20, 2024)."Georgia college student used Grammarly, now she is on academic probation".FOX 5 Atlanta.RetrievedApril 25,2024.
  14. ^Coffey, Lauren."Professors Cautious of Tools to Detect AI-Generated Writing".Inside Higher Ed.RetrievedApril 25,2024.
  15. ^"Welcome to help.turnitin.com, the new home for guides".turnitin.com.Turnitin, LLC. 2022.Archivedfrom the original on December 29, 2022.RetrievedJanuary 3,2023.
  16. ^[1]"Turnitin Partnership Adds Plagiarism Checking to College Admissions" ].Campus Technology,Rhea Kelly. June 26, 2019
  17. ^"Turnitin".The Dalhousie Gazette.Dalhousie University.November 4, 2011.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  18. ^"Schools' reliance on turnitin.com questioned".Excalibur.York University.December 1, 2010. Archived fromthe originalon December 11, 2010.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  19. ^abc"Minutes of Meeting"(PDF).msvu.ca.Mount Saint Vincent University.March 6, 2006.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  20. ^Foster, Andrea L.; May 17, 2002;Plagiarism-Detection Tool Creates Legal Quandary;The Chronicle of Higher Education;retrieved September 29, 2006
  21. ^A.V. et al. v. iParadigms, LLC,562 F.3d 630 (4th Cir. 2009)
  22. ^Carbone, Nick (2001)."Turnitin.com, a Pedagogic Placebo for Plagiarism".Bedford/St. Martin's.Archived fromthe originalon January 2, 2006.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  23. ^Schreiner, Valerie (November 20, 2019)."Supporting Originality From the Start: An Update on WriteCheck".Turnitin.RetrievedDecember 9,2019.
  24. ^Murphy, Elizabeth (September 9, 2011)."Plagiarism software WriteCheck troubles some educators".USA Today.RetrievedOctober 15,2011.
  25. ^"McGill student wins fight over anti-cheating website".CBC News.January 16, 2004. Archived fromthe originalon March 6, 2005.RetrievedApril 15,2007.
  26. ^Churchill, Liam (December 2, 2005)."Students: 2, Turnitin: 0".McGill Daily.Archived fromthe originalon May 17, 2007.RetrievedApril 15,2007.
  27. ^Amarnath, Ravi (March 15, 2006)."Mount St. Vincent bans Turnitin.com".The Gazette.Archived fromthe originalon July 30, 2012.RetrievedNovember 28,2011.
  28. ^"University opts not to 'Turnitin'".The Daily Princetonian.April 4, 2006.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  29. ^"Turnitin.com Information for Students".Ryerson University. December 5, 2006. Archived fromthe originalon September 30, 2012.RetrievedMarch 20,2009.
  30. ^"Brock Academic Integrity Policy".Brock University. October 3, 2013.RetrievedMarch 8,2016.
  31. ^Vanderhye, R. (April 16, 2007)."A.V., et. al. v. iParadigms, LLC: Amended Complaint for Copyright Infringement"(PDF).Archived fromthe original(PDF)on March 20, 2009.RetrievedMarch 20,2009.
  32. ^Hilton, Claude (2008)."Memorandum Opinion"(PDF).United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on July 5, 2010.{{cite journal}}:Cite journal requires|journal=(help)
  33. ^Barakat, Matthew (April 28, 2008)."Students appeal ruling favoring plagiarism detection service".Boston.com.Archived fromthe originalon December 6, 2008.RetrievedApril 29,2008.
  34. ^A.V. ex rel.Vanderhye v. iParadigms LLC,562 F.3d 630(4th Cir.2009).
  35. ^Heather, James (2010),"Turnitoff: identifying and fixing a hole in current plagiarism detection software"(PDF),Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education,35(6), London:Taylor & Francis:647–660,doi:10.1080/02602938.2010.486471,eISSN1469-297X,ISSN0260-2938,OCLC45107128,S2CID18091789,retrievedNovember 14,2020
  36. ^Rogerson, Ann; McCarthy, Grace (2017), "Using Internet based paraphrasing tools: Original work, patchwriting or facilitated plagiarism?",International Journal for Educational Integrity,13(1), London:BioMed Central,2,doi:10.1007/s40979-016-0013-y,ISSN1833-2595,OCLC812152707
  37. ^Straumsheim, Carl (April 28, 2017)."Someone else's words".Inside Higher Ed.RetrievedNovember 16,2020.
  38. ^Campbell, Audrey (September 25, 2019)."Can students trick Turnitin? Some students believe that they can" beat "Turnitin by employing various tactics".turnitin.com.RetrievedNovember 17,2020.
  39. ^"Michele Cortelazzo"(in Italian).RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  40. ^ab"Luci e ombre (tante) dei software antiplagio"[Lights and (many) shadows of anti plagiarism software] (in Italian). September 17, 2015.RetrievedNovember 18,2020.
  41. ^abScott Jaschik (March 13, 2009)."False Positives on Plagiarism".Inside Higher Ed.RetrievedDecember 4,2020.
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