Recently, a friend asked me to help edit a final paper his son is doing. He had to send to a site called Turnitin, which is supposed to check for plagiarism. His son showed me a pdf file that highlighted sections that were supposed plagiarized with links to where the content was from listed below. So, I helped with some editing, some rephrasing and managed to get him a much lower score.
Yet, I didn’t understand why some of the items were highlighted. Most of them were proper names, such as company names, governmental agencies or court cases. I managed to fix this by using abbreviations. So, “British Petroleum” would considered plagiarism, but not “B.P.” and the same goes to United States Supreme Court. Also, some of the links given for sources of the supposed plagiarism didn’t make sense. Some of them were corporations that had nothing to do with the topic, unless there’s something buried in their servers. Apparently, my re-phrasing confused it as helped him restated some ideas, but in a more detailed manner. A extra word here, an adjective there…poof… it passes.
So, exactly what is this site doing and how does it do it? From what I saw, it seemed almost a scam. Highlight random items, call it plagiarism to make it look as if you’re doing something to justify what they’re charging schools and colleges.
Well, you did it all wrong for him, based on discussions with a friend who’s a college teacher.
Those company names were probably wrong because they were missing the little ™ trademark symbol.
And plagiarism is defined as using the ideas/words of another without attribution. You changed words around to make it harder to detect automatically, but that student is still plagiarizing. What he probably should have done is to add a * after it, and then include a footnote citing the source where it was taken from. It may still be caught – depending on how well the professor knows the field, he may still recognize where it came from. Then the professor stole ideas from someone else, and tried to hide it by changing a few words around will probably get it treated more harshly.
Only the trademark owner needs to use the ™ symbol. You certainly must have seen it’s not used in newspaper stories about companies or their products. (Actually even the company doesn’t need to use it, but to recover damages they do need to show that someone else was aware of the trademark and that is one of the best ways to do so.)
Words and ideas don’t belong to anyone… at least not yet. And from the description given in the OP, it doesn’t sound like he was copying someone else’s words, he was using words someone, somewhere on the internet had had used before. The internet has billions of words on it. Not plagerism.
Just a company using a simple-minded algorithm, and making money off it.
It’s not clear - was this accidental (or intentional?) plagiarism, or were they “false positives.” Any instructor should realize that the score means nothing without checking the individual sections, including whether they were properly quoted.
Any tool for automatic plagiarism control will have a lot of false positives. The example text on Turnitin’s writecheck-page has a 4 % hit on the sentence fragment “the highest peak in the world in the” as the first highlighted section, and this obviously is not plagiarism.
The next 17 % hit though is a full sentence, and unless clearly marked as citation and with a cited source, would be plagiarism.
Such tools are poor at catching reworded passages, which can be plagiarism as well, and which definitely should have a source cited in any academic work.
As for the details in your accusation of the tool being crap I can’t comment since I haven’t used the tool in question.
That’s not as perfect a description as you seem to think.
Ideas cannot be copyrighted, or trademarked – this is true.
But words, even very short collections of them, can be. So in a real enough sense, words CAN belong to someone. Professional epigrammist Ashleigh Brilliant coined the phrase, “I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent,” and subsequently successfully sued a T-shirt manufacturer who was selling shirts with the phrase.
I’m intrigued as to what the 17% means. The sentence is a garbled mess and reads as thought written by someone who doesn’t speak English. Is it supposedly a “bit” plagiarized?
Its the amount of the article that it has decided could be plagiarized.
For a short paragraph, a little bit easily hit 15%.
Really you are looking to see if the text is copied from one source… when its only saying some little bit is plgiarized you can just ignore it, you don’t have to change British Petroleum into BP … anything so insigificant can be ignored…
It shows matches, and shows where the matches came from. It is up to the marker to use the information to help them determine if there is any plagiarism. I haven’t used it in a while, but when I did every paper would get a score, I think most in the 10-30% range. Even if a paper is in the higher end, this wouldn’t mean it plagiarised, but it might mean it is worth checking why it has been flagged with a high percentage. (Conversely a low score doesn’t mean it hasn’t involved plagiarism.) From their site:
I’d say not to cut down the percentage for the sake of it, and certainly not by avoiding proper name matches. (Well, assuming the marker is using turnitin as intended, and not taking the percentage score as indicative on its own as a problem.)
I wouldn’t worry too much about the turnitin score. As others have said, a good lecturer won’t accuse you of plagiarism based on the score.
When I was in uni, getting around 50% on turnitin was not uncommon. A lot of this was because I did law and hence all the case citations were found in thousands of other essays.
It also always highlighted my name and student number because they appeared in other work submitted to the university. Yeah, my work…
Let me rewrite that without assuming the reader understands what a text marked by a plagiarism detector looks like.
*The next part of the example text highlighted as possible plagiarism is labeled 17% and is a full sentence. Unless clearly marked etc.
*
I didn’t through the text to see if it’s merely a percentage of the examined text or some sort of rating. I suppose I’ve become blind to meaningless ratings and just look past them to judge what’s underneath.
Also, some of the links given for sources of the supposed plagiarism didn’t make sense. Some of them were corporations that had nothing to do with the topic, unless there’s something buried in their servers. Apparently, my re-phrasing confused it as helped him restated some ideas, but in a more detailed manner. A extra word here, an adjective there…poof… it passes.