Fighting Plagiarism with Technology

Fighting Plagiarism

At one time the Internet made it increasingly easier for students to copy the work of others. Websites with pre-written essays popped up all over the Internet and for a small fee students could purchase these papers and turn them in as their own original work. Teachers were limited on how they could identify these plagiarized papers.

The Internet also made it easy for students to copy and paste sentences and even complete paragraphs from online sources. Often times the copied work would stand out from the rest of the paper allowing teachers to realize plagiarism may have occurred.

The Internet is still jam packed with websites like, unemployedprofessors.com, which claims to provide high quality, un-plagiarized essays for a small fee. Students are also continuing to copy and paste the words of others as their own. But now, teachers have a tool to help them identify and prove plagiarism.

Websites have been developed to detect text that matches other sources. Basically these sites are plagiarism trackers.

A widely used plagiarism detecting website is Turnit.com. This site checks students' work against the world's largest comparable database for possible plagiarism. It’s a simple program. Students submit their paper into the Turnitin website and then the program goes to work. It checks for text that matches other sources in the large Turnitin database and highlights all matching text. The checked and highlighted version of the submitted paper is available for student and teacher viewing.

Turnitin.com is not perfect. It detects common phrases and even text parenthesis and highlights it. Common phrases are usually not a sign of plagiarism. Quotes and in text citations, if cited properly, are not forms of plagiarism. Teachers have to view the highlighted material, which is the text that matches other text in the database, and decide if the material was actually plagiarized. Turnitin.com does not do all the work, but certainly helps aid teachers in detecting plagiarism.

My Opinion

It’s easy to plagiarize. Websites selling essays are plastered all over the Internet. But there’s also the more innocent type of plagiarizing where a student “borrows” a few words or sentences here and there to fill a paper requirement. No matter the intent, using someone else’s work as your own is plagiarizing and plagiarizing is wrong. In a sense it’s stealing. Your stealing someone else’s original thoughts and ideas and attempting to pass them off as your own, it’s not right. Plagiarizing isn’t getting any harder but detecting it is getting easier…and that’s half the battle.

Websites like Turnitin.com help discourage students from plagiarizing. Students know all copied work will show up to their instructor in a highlighted document. That’s a scary thought to most students since a lot of schools have a 0 tolerance policy for high levels of plagiarism.

Turnitin.com also helps teachers identify plagiarism. This is beneficial in the grading process and can also lead to lessons on ways to prevent plagiarism, which is helpful to all involved.

Cheating is easy, but now so is detecting it.