Southeast professors use technology to confront plagiarism

Plagiarism is a serious crime in the education world. If a student is caught plagiarizing, they can face consequences from receiving a zero in the class to being kicked out of school entirely.

Thankfully, there is a website that can stop this from happening.

Turnitin, a website used by more than 3,500 universities, spots plagiarism for instructors before students suffer drastic consequences.

Christine Warren, a literature instructor at Southeast Missouri State University, has been using the website for three years.

"I like it a lot," Warren said. "I've been using it ever since I began teaching at the university level."

When a student finishes a paper, they turn it in to the website and the instructor. The website then uses three databases for content matching.

Turnitin searches more than 40 billion web pages, 300 million archived student papers and 130 million articles from more than 100,000 periodicals and books.

"I don't want my students just handing in a friend's essay," Warren said. "And, let's face it, I'm not going to know unless I can verify it through Turnitin first. If that same paper were turned into Southeast and Turnitin, then Turnitin would pick that up."

According to its website, Turnitin processed more than 80 million papers in 2012 and an average of 190,000 papers are submitted per day.

"I have had situations where I had to approach a student and tell them that, according to Turnitin, it was not their original work," Warren said. "That way the student has no defense and there can be no argument."

Warren said the website also acts as a deterrent.

"When students know that their work will be thoroughly checked for plagiarism against multiple websites, they won't plagiarize. It's that simple," Warren said.

Jennifer Weiss, the coordinator of the Center for Writing Excellence, said she has seen Turnitin catch plagiarism where teachers could not.

"There are hallmarks that teachers use to catch plagiarism -- like getting to know a person's voice -- but some classes only assign one or two papers a semester so those instructors don't have that advantage," Weiss said. "So Turnitin would help in instances like that."

Weiss said most students don't mean to plagiarize and that it is accidental.

"They might think this way of summarizing or paraphrasing is appropriate, but Turnitin says that originality isn't there, so it might be one of those light bulb moments," Weiss said. "It's beneficial to help students see what plagiarism really is, not just copying every word down. It can go beyond that."

Turnitin also helps international students understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

"Since our university student body is so diverse, we have a lot of students coming from different countries and their rules of using other people's work vary," Weiss said. "Some countries see it as a form of flattery, so they don't call it plagiarism. So they come here with that knowledge on how to use sources. This can help them as well because they don't have that background of plagiarism."

The website doesn't just help prevent plagiarism, it helps instructors grade papers and form online peer review groups as well.

"We have a three-part sweep through Turnitin," Weiss said. "So we have the originality checker, which includes that plagiarism checker. We have a part of it called PeerMark, which is the online version of peer review groups. And then there is GradeMark, which allows the teachers to make comments on the papers."

With PeerMark, the instructor uploads a roster of students, and then it's up to the students to submit their papers.

"The papers can be anonymous, so it's really unbiased," Weiss said. "It's a fair look at it, and it really allows those students to hone those critical thinking skills."

The third program, GradeMark, not only allows teachers to make comments to students, it helps students know what the error is and how to fix it.

"Instead of just saying 'comma splice,' the program explains what a comma splice is and how to correct it," Weiss said. "I know what a comma splice is, but my student might not. So I either have to type all that out time and time again, so this takes a lot of the question out of it."

GradeMark also has a voice option.

"One of the things we find when we do online submitted papers and comment on them is that we have to watch the tone of our words because that's all we have," Weiss said. "We don't have a smile to soften the critique. Using the voice option won't seem so harsh."

Turnitin is funded by the university's Kent Library and is going under budget review in the spring.

"We hope that it will be something that all departments on campus can contribute to because it is a little bit expensive," Weiss said. "Just one department footing the bill for the program that benefits everyone can get costly."

Weiss said the charges never would affect the students.