Turnitin
Turnitin (stylized as turnitin) is an Internet-based similarity detection service run by the American company Turnitin, LLC, a subsidiary of Advance Publications.
Founded in 1998, it sells its licenses to universities and high schools who then use the software as a service (SaaS) website to check submitted documents against its database and the content of other websites with the aim of identifying plagiarism. Results can identify similarities with existing sources and can also be used in formative assessment to help students learn to avoid plagiarism and improve their writing.
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 a presumption of guilt. Some critics have alleged that use of this proprietary software violates educational privacy as well as international intellectual-property laws, and exploits students' works for commercial purposes by permanently storing them in Turnitin's privately held database.[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 called iThenticate. Other tools included with the Turnitin suite are GradeMark (online grading and corrective feedback) and PeerMark (student peer-review service).
In March 2019, Advance Publications acquired Turnitin, LLC for US$1.75 billion.[2]
In the UK, the service is supported and promoted by JISC as 'Plagiarism Detection Service Turnitin UK'. The Service is operated by iParadigms, in conjunction with Northumbria Learning, the European reseller of the Service.[3]
Litigation[edit]
In one well-publicized dispute over mandatory Turnitin submissions, Jesse Rosenfeld, a student at McGill University declined, 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.[25] 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.[26]
In 2006, the Senate at Mount Saint Vincent University in 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.[18] 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,[27] following decisions by Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford not to use Turnitin.[28]
At Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, students may decide whether to submit their work to Turnitin.com or make alternate arrangements with an instructor.[29]
Similar policies are in place at Brock University in Saint Catharines.[30]
On March 27, 2007, with the help of an intellectual property attorney, two students from McLean High School in Virginia (with assistance from the Committee For Students' Rights) and two students attending Desert Vista High School in Phoenix, Arizona, filed suit in United States Circuit Court (Eastern District, Alexandria Division) alleging copyright infringement by iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company.[31] Nearly a year later, Judge Claude M. Hilton granted summary judgment on the students' complaint in favor of iParadigms/Turnitin,[32] because they had accepted the click-wrap agreement on the Turnitin website. The students appealed the ruling,[33] and on April 16, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed Judge Hilton's judgment in favor of iParadigms/Turnitin.[34]
Flaws[edit]
Ad hoc encodings, fonts and text representation[edit]
Several flaws and bugs in the Turnitin plagiarism detection software have been documented in scientific literature.[35] In particular, Turnitin has been proven to be vulnerable to
Further criticism[edit]
The Italian scholar Michele Cortelazzo, full professor of linguistics, who also studies copyright attribution and similarity between texts,[39] noted that, ironically, it is impossible to tell if Turnitin's source code has been plagiarized from other sources, because it is not open source.[40] For the same reason, it is unknown what scientific methodologies, if any, Turnitin uses to assess papers.[40]
In 2009, a group of researchers from Texas Tech University reported that many of the instances of "non-originality" that Turnitin finds aren't plagiarism, but are just the use of jargon, course terms or phrases that 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 of childhood obesity continues to rise").[41]
Turnitin was also criticized for paying panelists at conferences on education and writing.[41]