In an age of online paper mills spitting out weak, sickly puppies of papers and destroying the integrity of college composition, I find myself becoming an anti-Cruella De Vil out to eliminate any use of such atrocities, checking and re-checking students’ papers to make sure no Dalmatian spots of plagiarism are found.

These internet services offer essays, term papers, research papers and the like to students of all ages and subjects. The more "reputable” of these sites prefer to charge a fee for their services, but free sites also exist for the less-fortunate (but no less-lazy) students. Don’t be fooled into thinking only freshman composition professors need worry about such sites. These mills prey on all matter of students. If a student must write anything in your class—from journal entries to theses—you, too, are in danger of receiving regurgitated ideas from the outer limits of cyber space. All manner of poorly-written essays on subjects from the Iliad to Iconography to Israel are left to be picked up and cuddled by students who like the looks of such a cheap and innocent-looking "puppy” in the cardboard box on the sidewalk.

"Turnitin.com has no doubt made me a better teacher. Something that would've taken me a hundred hours now takes me twenty hours over the course of a two-week period. And the kids get it [...] so they tend to be more receptive to the GradeMark than they are to my own handwritten comments.”

My aim when I first began using Turnitin's OriginalityCheck was to detect and punish plagiarizers, especially those who might be recycling papers from a previous section of my International Marketing course. Very quickly, within the first term’s use, I came to realize that my students were not intentionally cheating. Rather, they just did not know the mechanics of research and acknowledgment practice. As a result, I switched my focus from punishment to teaching the basics of source identification, selection of material, quotation, paraphrasing, citation, and referencing. I now tell my students to view submission of their papers to turnitin.com as a learning experience. And to bolster that message, I admit to them that I have submitted several of my own papers to the service.

Students who do not use their school’s library writing centers are missing important, helpful programs, and their grades may be suffering because of this. Online universities offer some very useful tools that can help students to edit their papers, locate scholarly journals, and even double-check for plagiarism issues. One of the most useful programs available to students is OriginalityCheck by Turnitin.

The successful student will do their research through the school’s library database search engines. Once they have written their paper, and have double-checked that they have met all of the teacher’s requirements, they will submit their assignment to Turnitin (required by many schools). OriginalityCheck is the leading program that checks for plagiarism issues. The program carries over 150 million archived papers. There are a variety of websites where students can purchase papers. Schools are very aware of these sites and programs like Turnitin will catch these papers. Students should be aware that professors will submit their papers to Turnitin and will catch them if they try to submit work that is not their own.

The University of Phoenix uses Turnitin's plagiarism prevention tool in its Center for Writing Excellence. The software has guided me through a master’s program with the university and through the first courses of my doctorate degree. In the beginning of my master’s program, I used Turnitin to examine whether or not I was using too many quotes, or I was not paraphrasing well enough. As the program continued, I began to use it for checking my academic teams’ contributions. Once, at the eleventh hour of a project, I discovered that a teammate had copied and pasted his portion of the team project. I asked him review his contribution, paraphrase, and properly cite it, averting a possible low grade.

This Turnitin infographic is based on a white paper which offers a look into the web sources and writing practices of secondary and higher education students in the United States. It is based on the analysis of 128 million content matches from 33 million papers (24 million from higher education and nine million from secondary) over a one-year period.

Key findings include:

• Secondary students rely more on social networking and content-sharing sites.
• Higher education students rely more on paper mills and cheat sites.
• Wikipedia is the most popular site for both groups.
• Eight sites appear among the top ten most popular web sources for both secondary and higher education students.
• Educators should develop specific strategies to address plagiarism.

Turnitin power user Cath Ellis from the University of Huddersfield presents her institution’s experience of using GradeMark as a tool for online submission and evaluation. She highlights the benefits this approach has for students, staff and the university as a whole. A pilot project with first year students has prompted the development of an institutional strategy on online submission, which has involved a comprehensive streamlining of work flows and a separation of administrative and academic staff roles. Cath also demonstrates the diagnostic abilities of using GradeMark to highlight student strengths and weaknesses and identify where extra support may be required.

Check out this infographic created by our friends at Schools.com inspired from the article, "Beat the Cheat" by Amy Novotney in Monitor on Psychology.

Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation published a report presenting the results of a national survey of 40,000 public school teachers from pre-K to 12th grade.
The survey identified five broad solution areas to address the challenges facing schools today and to help ensure that all students achieve at their highest levels:

1. Establish Clear Standards, Common Across States


2. Use Multiple Measures to Evaluate Student Performance


3. Innovate to Reach Today’s Students


4. Accurately Measure Teacher Performance and Provide Non-Monetary Rewards


5. Bridge School and Home to Raise Student Achievement

Some students believe that they can "beat" Turnitin by employing various tactics. Instructors should rest assured that these tactics do not work as our algorithms take such "tricks" into account. In addition, the best practice for ensuring that students are not able to "beat the system" is to review all Originality Reports - regardless of the percentage shown as the Similarity Index. Instructors who look at the Originality Reports will be able to tell if something untoward has occurred.

What tricks do students try?

One trick is to replace a common character like "e" throughout the text of their paper with a foreign language character that looks like an "e" but is actually different (for example, a Cyrillic "e"). This method does not work because our algorithms replace such characters with the corresponding standard English character. The special character will still appear in the Originality Report; however, the word it is in will have been matched against words containing every character that looks like that character. This allows us to show you matches to words with both the special character and the standard character.