I’ve been using TurnItIn.com in my graduate courses for several years, mostly because I like the service’s features. I can mark papers online, without having to use Microsoft Word or a PDF tool.
But TurnItIn.com started as a set of paper-checking features that I do use. I encourage my students to submit their papers early and check their own originality reports, as the reports can be very helpful.
USA Today ran an interesting article on 19 November 2009 called Case of the purloined term paper; when work is resold. Melinda Rieboldt found out about student plagiarism the hard way, when her children were searching Google and discovered a group paper she had helped write in a University of Phoenix MBA course. Melinda says that no one in her 5-member student group knows how that paper was posted online.
Paper mills, custom essay companies and other online sources may help students finish their assignments faster. The USA Today article quotes Notre Dame professor Susan Blum, who expresses a common belief among educators: the process of completing an assignment is a valuable and important part of education.
Image courtesy of nenyaki on flickr via a Careative Commons license.
