Teachers in West Windsor-Plainsboro district use online tool to fight back against cheating.
By: Gwen McNamara
The Internet provides easy access to tons of information information a growing number of students may be tempted to plagiarize.
But teachers in the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District are wise to the problem and have found their own online tool to fight back.
Teachers, particularly at the high school level, are using the services of Turnitin.com, a relatively new Internet-based plagiarism-detection service.
"The service is indispensable," said Rose Leonard, a language arts teacher at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South. "It levels the playing field and not only makes our students more honest, but better learners as well."
Using the Web site, teachers can electronically submit a portion of text or have students submit entire papers or projects to be verified for originality.
The Web site checks the submitted work against more than 2 billion Internet pages, millions of published works and every student paper ever submitted to Turnitin.com.
Within 24 hours, the Web site provides a customized originality report, highlighting any copied or paraphrased text with a link to its original source.
Some teachers require all their students to submit their work through Turnitin.com in addition to handing in their assignments, while others just use the site when they find questionable material.
James McCulloch, a language arts teacher at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North, has been using Turnitin.com for the past three years, but decided to have all his students submit work to the site this year for the first time.
"The site really serves several purposes," he said. "It’s mainly a deterrent, but it also provides teachers with an archive of student material and can act as a resource for students to check out each other’s work.
"If, for instance, I get an outstanding paper, I can have the class check it out online," he continued. "Plus, a lot of times, kids get frustrated and say, ‘I don’t know what you want.’ Now I can direct them to that outstanding paper as a concrete example so they can compare their own work."
As a deterrent, teachers say the Web site has proven to be effective.
"When I first started using the site, I probably caught about seven kids," Mr. McCulloch said. "This year I’ve only caught one. You’re never going to eliminate the problem completely, but this is a great start."
Ms. Leonard agreed.
"So far this year, I haven’t had any instances of plagiarism," she said. "But in the past, it wasn’t just research papers that were the problem. I’ve had students copy journal entries from the Internet. Even with creative writing, I once had a student download song lyrics and try to pass it off as a poem.
"Plagiarism not only sets students up for problems later on in college, but is unfair to the other students in class," she continued.
Using Turnitin.com also saves teachers time, Mr. McCulloch added.
"With this service I know I’m going to get reliable information and don’t have to spend hours online myself checking out one sentence of a paper," he said.
To use the Web site, both High School South and High School North have purchased site licenses for about $500, which enable teachers and students to use passwords to access the site’s services.
"The teachers are very happy with the Web site. It’s made a huge difference," said Randye McBride, a librarian at High School South and the school’s Turnitin.com administrator. "The Internet is so pervasive, it’s so easy for students to find a paper online or just copy and paste what they need.
"Turnitin.com is definitely worthwhile," she continued. "Its benefits outweigh the cost."
Turnitin.com came to fruition after a group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley created a series of computer programs in 1996 to monitor the recycling of research papers in undergraduate classes, according to the Turnitin.com Web site.
Inspired by positive feedback from their peers, the researchers teamed up with a group of teachers, mathematicians and computer scientists to form Plagiarism.org, the first generation of Turnitin.com.
By 1998, Plagiarism.org had gained national recognition through publicity in major news outlets, such as Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight and The New York Times. Since then, Plagiarism.org has been transformed into what is now recognized as Turnitin.com.