When I worked loss prevention, we stressed methods of preventing shoplifting rather than detecting it... mostly by making shoppers aware that someone was watching.
When it comes to students and plagiarism, if Turnitin makes them aware someone's watching and reduces the temptation to cheat, I'm all for it too.
Overall, I'm satisfied with the software and plan to continue to use it. It does give quite a few false positives, but a teacher with half a brain can figure out that those aren't plagiarism. When it discovers that my student wrote "Langston Hughes wrote 'A Negro Speaks of Rivers' in 1921..." and a student at a high school in Ohio wrote the exact same sentence, I know enough to realize this is coincidence. It's not exactly great writing, but it's functional and there aren't many other ways of saying the same thing.
I also selected the option to ignore quoted material, since that just identified all the quotes in the paper. I really didn't need it to do that for me.
Now my students papers are part of that huge database of papers they run all the new submissions against. I wonder what they'll make of the student who submitted a paper that started out talking about Frost but ended with a narrative of how the speaker met the love of his life in an Outback Steakhouse restaurant? It's a hoot! It almost rivals "Don't be Panic"... which is still in my mind the best student paper ever! When I get depressed about what my students are doing, all I do is play the video and it makes me feel so much better! (thanks to rlt for the reminder)
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