Who wrote that paper?

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.

Tagged as: assignment, cheating, group, Internet, MBA, paper, project, student, turnitin, writing