"Finding Applicants Who Plagiarize "

etselec
Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:08:57 +0000

The intellectual property issue is a big one. Turnitin stores all submitted papers in its database to compare against future papers, and students must pay by the page to have their papers–their own work that they wrote!–removed from the database.

If turnitin were widely used among college admissions offices, the problem of self-plagiarism resulting in false positives would be even more common than previous posters have suggested. If Johnny writes an essay and submits it (with perhaps a few tweaks here and there) to two different schools, the plagiarism detector at the second school will announce that Johnny has copied the essay. Now, in academic classes students are not supposed to self-plagiarize work from other classes, but it is widely accepted that students may submit the same admissions essay to multiple schools.

This is a sort of catch-22: if the program has no way to know the name of the student who wrote the original, it has no way to tell if it’s the same student submitting the second one. But if the program does have that access, it’s a pretty grave violation of student privacy.

Turnitin has a lot going for it, to be sure, but I think it might need to be adapted significantly for admissions purposes to resolve some of these issues.