Gunnar,

I used Turnitin for years at my last institution, and I would still be
using it now, *if* I had access to an institutional subscription (last I
checked, I didn't).

Turnitin is useful not so much because it tells the instructor/TA *and* the
student the overall percentage of content in each paper that comes from
other sources, but rather because it also *highlights* all of those
passages—whether plagiarized or properly quoted/cited—and indicates a url
where matching text was found. (However, the urls it finds are not always
the* original* sources, nor the same ones that the students have cited.
That is because—if you haven't noticed—there's a lot of plagiarism on the
internet. Thus the same passages of text sometimes appear on many different
websites. So I always checked to see if Turnitin's "citations" matched the
student's).

I haven't used Grammarly's plagiarism detector myself, but a colleague of
mine who has the paid version successfully used it to verify a suspected
case of plagiarism, and sent me the report. It does essentially the same
thing Turnitin does: it marks passages for which it can find close matches
somewhere on the internet, and provides the urls for those pages. This
makes it very, very easy for instructors to provide pretty airtight
supporting evidence for accusations of plagiarism, and very hard for
students to deny those accusations. That is helpful whether you merely want
to use the report as a springboard for a "teachable moment" in an
individual meeting with the student, or to report a student for a serious
breach of academic integrity.

The caveat, as you note, Gunnar, is that in both Turnitin and Grammarly, a
high overall percentage of borrowed content doesn't necessarily mean the
student plagiarized. Even if the overall percentage of borrowed content is
25% or 50%, the instructor still needs to look at each of the highlighted
passages to see whether the student cited them correctly or not. As in your
case,a 25% overall percentage doesn't mean that 25% of the paper is
*plagiarized*; it might just mean that there are a lot of perfectly
appropriately cited quotations. The instructor is responsible for
discerning whether that's the case or not. If everything is cited properly,
then there's no problem, regardless of what Turnitin says the overall
percentage of borrowed content is. (Though of course it's still at the
discretion of the instructor to say "Gunnar, 25% of your paper is quoted,
and it says in the syllabus that you should not exceed 15%, so I'm failing
you." But that's a somewhat different issue, and I would hope that a
reasonable instructor would recognize that some kinds of writing require
higher percentages of quoted materials than others.)

The other thing to be aware of is that neither Turnitin nor Grammarly can
catch *every* instance of plagiarism, because both rely on internet
searches to check for matching text. If one were to plagiarize an obscure
mid-century text that is not accessible online, then neither Turnitin nor
Grammarly would be likely to catch it. But a student who goes to the
trouble of finding such a source—which would require GOING TO AN ACTUAL
LIBRARY to a find a hard copy of such a book or journal article—is probably
not the kind of student who is likely to plagiarize. I get the sense that
most plagiarism occurs out of desperation, in the middle of the night, as a
deadline nears (and when the library is closed). Most plagiarized papers
I've seen are bricolages of easily located internet sources; there's
nothing particularly devious or clever about the plagiarism, it other
words. (On the other hand, it's possible I just haven't ever *caught* the
devious and clever plagiarizers...but I do remember in the early days of
the internet, pre-Turnitin and Google Books, I caught more than one person
because their writing tone noticeably shifted, and I was able to locate
those passages in books that I owned! But that was very slow work. And
that's why I'm a fan of Turnitin.)

C

CARMA GORMAN, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Assistant Chair
The University of Texas at Austin  |  Department of Art and Art History
+1 512-471-0901 <(512)%20471-0901>  |  [log in to unmask]

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 10:33 AM, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> I haven’t used Grammarly or Turnitin. I’m curious whether they flag legit
> quotations as plagiarism. (From what I’d read, earlier versions of Turnitin
> did.)
>
> Out of curiosity, I took something I wrote recently that I believe to be
> in no way plagiarized and counted quoted words. They added up to about a
> quarter of my essay. I’ve read multiple comments about universities or
> departments having a <15% Turnitin standard leaving me wondering whether
> that means a 14% plagiarized writing is okay with them and my
> non-plagiarized writing would not be.
>
>
> Gunnar
>
> Gunnar Swanson
> East Carolina University
> graphic design program
>
> http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Gunnar Swanson Design Office
> 1901 East 6th Street
> Greenville NC 27858
> USA
>
> http://www.gunnarswanson.com
> [log in to unmask]
> +1 252 258-7006
>
>
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