Prof. using Turn it in . com

[BoardWalkBelle]

Hi
Does anyone have any experience with prof. who use turn it in . com or similar anti plagerism sofware? I curreently have an online course that uses this. I turned in my first paper for the course. I went and looked at the report and it has my essay as being 9 percent plagerized.I looked at the sources and it is totally stupid.. The title came up as9 % plagerised, which i can see because i am sure this title is used alot (it is the title of two books) and two other noitations, but nothing in the body of my essay..anyway, how does the prof, use this info?

 

[theclaw]

I had a teacher once who decided she would try it out for one of our papers. Even she decided it was too stupid to use and never made us do it again.

 

[keypooh90]

My professors at my previous college always used one of those types of software (can't remember which one). None of my papers ever got flagged as plagiarism.

 

[PrincessDream]

I've used it before. Although 9% sounds like a big deal, it really isn't. Every paper I turned in through that service came up as "plagiarized," because I would use quotes and titles and such. I think they (and you as well) are able to examine where it finds the matches, and they will see that it isn't a big deal. My high school teacher who used the software never mentioned using the info, but I'd imagine they just gaze over it generally, unless the percentage is very high. The professors are familiar with this. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to approach them with your concerns, however.

 

[Jayana]

My school uses a system like this (SafeAssign), and if you have any references it'll come up partly plagiarized. One of my papers came up 11%, but on ours I could see what was highlighted as plagiarized and where they thought I stole it. Most of my works cited were highlighted, but I'd used them correctly. Other places I'd just strung words together the same way someone else did on a totally unrelated topic. Your teacher knows how this works, especially if they've used it before. I wouldn't sweat it. It's mostly to catch people that are trying to show off complete works they found or bought online as their own.

 

[slp1650]

Turn It In.com doesn't understand quotations so having low plagiarism is normal. You just have to make sure that it is cited correctly for when your professor reads it.

 

[Keepin It Classy]

im a senior in high school and we use turnitin.com for AP Lit and more than seventy percent of our papers come up as palagerized and its not just because of quotes and what not its bc our teacher uses the same prompt every year so obviously some things are going to be similar if not identical because its the same topic on the same book.

 

[The_Aviator]

yeah I've used turnitin for a number of different courses I'm doing at the moment. 9% is NOT something you will need to worry about

As others have said, things like quotes, title and bibliography will often come up as 'plagiarised' because other people will have submitted the exact same things before. I believe there's an option if you do a bit of digging through the website (on the originality report I think) for you to exclude both quotes and bibliography. As an example, I had one that came up with 31% plagiarised (it wasn't plagiarised at all) and then when I excluded bibliography and quotes it dropped to 6%.

All in all, it's a very silly piece of software but it is useful in catching out the real plagiarisers, the ones that would get scores like 60%, 70% etc. Generally the teachers really don't care if it's less than 30% or so (and since it highlights the plagiarised text they can see if you just copied a block of text or if turnitin just saw one sentence and assumed it was plagiarised) and they won't usually call you up unless it's like 50% or more.

Hope that helps

 

[BoardWalkBelle]

Thanks everyone!

 

[Berlioz70]

For my Thesis we were required to post several drafts to show our progress. By the time I submitted my final, my paper was 100% plagarized... I was stealing from myself.