Project 3

Part 1 : The problem I have chosen is that of plagiarism. I have experienced this as a student, and know how discouraging it is to work hard on something and then get a worse grade than someone you know cheated. However this problem not only hurts the honest students who are discouraged. Plagiarism is harmful to those who get in the habit of "taking the easy way out." Here are just a few scary statistics:

"A study by The Center for Academic Integrity found that almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once.

According to a survey by the Psychological Record 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material.

A poll conducted by US News and World Reports found that 90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined.

The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next (Free Press, July 1996) states that 58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989." (from http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_facts.html)

Part 2 – There are new methods, however, of limiting plagiarism through fascinating technological devices which attempt to detect cheaters. The most prominent of these are online plagiarism detection devices such as turnitin.com

The goal of such sites is to make sure that papers are not recycled from one university to another, from one class to another, from one student to another.

For this project I went to the turnitin.com site and read articles about how it works, as well as watched the tutorial video. Then I called my sister who is signed up with turnitin and got her password information so that I could log in and see what it is like to navigate the site. Through this I found turn it in to be extremely useful. There were ways to grade the papers digitally (thus saving paper), and allowing teachers to type their feedback (which saves them time). Teachers could use it to have their students peer review each others work, thus encouraging positive types of collaboration without eating up class time. There was also a place the students could go to see their grades and find out how they were doing in the class, and there was a way to send messages between classmates/teachers. This researched showed me that not only does turnitin help plagiarism (by comparing papers in a huge database) but it can also be used for so much more. Turnitin, however, does do an excellent job attacking plagiarism. When the papers are submitted by the students, they are compared to millions of articles and papers across the globe, through originality check. If matches are found, the teacher is informed and they can act accordingly with that particular student. I was extremely impressed with turnitin.com and would be very tempted to use it for my students. This new technology saves time, money, paper, and drastically limits plagiarism.