Thoughts on Turnitin’s database

Image via Wikipedia

I was reviewing some originality reports generated by Turnitin for some first year undergraduate work today and it struck me that their database  has grown to such an extent that I no longer trust it. I thought that this would never be the case. I assumed that as the database of harvested web pages and student papers grew, the accuraacy of detection would increase. Bigger is better, right? I didn’t think about noise though. There is some filtering in the Turnitin system, but increasingly it seems it isn’t good enough.

An example, one student has a list of 6 different sources all matching to small parts of student essays deposited as ‘reference material’ on courseworkinfo.com and related websites all owned byt he same company, and in likelihood sharing the same database. Do I believe that this student copied from this site? I’m not sure. Do I believe that each of the essays on the site may have originally been copied from wikipedia? more likely. Do I believe that all content on wikipedia is original? Not really.

Recycling and repurposing of text online is becoming so ubquituous that the noise is casuing a problem in the interpretation of originality reports. They used to save us time in investigating cases of plagiarism, now I’m not so sure.

Electronic detection of plagiarism

Under the Higher Education Academy’s enhancing learning through technology work, Jon Scott and I have a funded project to look at the effectiveness and implications of electronic detection of plagiarism in Higher Education. This is  part of the 2009 evidence net series of synthesis projects.

We are in the process of producing a synthesis on the evidence of the effectiveness, use and implementation of plagiarism detection by electronic means ‘Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age’. To support and continue the project, all the references for the synthesis will be added to a group in citeulike.

The citeulike group ‘e-plagiarism’ is open for anyone to join. You can contribute to the collection of references in this area as well as benefitting from access to a shared bibliography. Searching for papers in this area is not straightforward, since the subject cuts across many different boundaries in education and much of the research has been published in subject specific education journals. Using social bookmarking will provide a resource that can be added to as more papers in this area are published.

If you have an interest in this area of research, or have a favourite paper that I haven’t included in the bibliography so far, please join the group and add your contribution!

Aargh! Turnitin fail

I’ve had my head against a brick wall today with several technical problems. The main one being that in some of our blackboard courses, Turnitin is not functioning, you can’t view old assignments, modify them or create new assignments. It turns out that this is because we were at the bleeding edge of using turnitin and we’ve been expired!

It’s rather tortuous but can be fixed by Turnitin, so if this has happened to you, get your admin person to contact iParadigms.

Way back in the mists of time (well it was 2004), we at University of Leicester installed an early version of the plug-in that connected Blackboard and Turnitin (version 1.something, I think). When a Turnitin Assignment is created on a Blackboard course using this plug-in, a corresponding class is created in Turnitin. This class is the container for the individual assignments and is a related to the stand alone version of Turnitin which operates like a mini VLE. This class container is never seen by the Blackboard user (instructor nor student), as they operate at the assignment level. the Blackboard module is their ’class’ equivalent.  The old plug-in set expiration dates on these classes, and having been around long enough, our Blackboard courses that first tried the Turnitin integrated system back in 2004/5 have now expired and so cannot use Turnitin in any shape or form. This is also a consequence of us recycling our Blackboard courses, keeping the content the same but refreshing the student cohort each year.

The good news is that this can be fixed by the Turnitin support staff in the States, who can renew the classes and set them to never expire, but it’s not something your institutional admin can sort out. the bad news is that until they fix it, these Blackbaord courses can’t use Turnitin and term starts on Monday. Fingers crossed for a quick response from the States!

Update: Monday 28 Sept. No it’s worse than that – response from TII is: ‘iParadigms have told us that all classes that are created have a maximum duration of 5 years. after this point they will expire and will not be able to be extended.’ This is a major problem for anyone that recycles their blackboard courses year on year and uses TII integration. All your courses will have a 5 year life span and then they will have to be re-made to reset the expiration date.  If this affects your institution please raise a support ticket to TII to ask them to rethink this policy. Emailing directly to requktii@turnitin.com. If this does not work, you can use the form at https://submit.ac.uk/help/helpdesk.asp