At one institution I worked, which shall remain nameless, trying to fool Turnitin was something of a national pastime/preoccupation amongst my Pre-master’s students. Pretty much everything already mentioned (e.g. submitting graphics, white spaces, and back translation)  was used on a frequent and regular basis. Also some essay mills offer ‘Turnitin checked’ services.

Students would aim for the Holy Grail of a 0% score without recognising that such a score was itself indicative of plagiarism in my eyes. For example, because references and citations were not excluded from the check, something I would recommend, there should always be a score above zero. So a zero would always provoke further investigation and students were warned that this would occur.

I found that some essay providers would tweak or fabricate references, for example, to satisfy their student-clients’ demand for zero or negligible scores. Or they would plunder papers published in sources not available on-line. In one instance, a feasibility study for an air ambulance service in Scotland was found to have been published originally in Norway, with the former nation substituted in the text for the latter throughout. It was the perfect score which led me to that discovery.

Over time I formed the view that Turnitin was less useful as a plagiarism tool than its marketing would have us believe and that both students and some colleagues were engaged in a futile fetishism focussed on percentages By prioritizing it as a blunt force tool for catching out lazy or dishonest students or, more commonly in my experience, students who lack confidence in or have a poor command of academic English and academic style  we might rather consider using Turnitin as a potentially valuable tool for improving the quality of work presented and teaching students about academic honesty and integrity .

There are so many ways in which it can be used as a means of encouraging reflection on the work presented and the nature of academic style.  While institutional constraints prevented me from using TII in class I did incorporate its free, on-line equivalents into classes as a means of showing students a) how easily they could be caught out and, more significantly, b) how they could use their errors to improve the quality of the work submitted.

They were able, for example, to obtain for free feedback on drafts that hard pressed lecturers would never have the time to give them. More importantly, they could avoid plagiarism charges not by improving the quality of their plagiarism but by improving the quality of their work. 

Students for whom poor English or lack of confidence was a cause of their plagiarism found the sessions helpful, the would-be cheats were given pause for thought, and the die-hard system gamers re-doubled their efforts to find ways around the system. So it goes.

If we are constrained to use TII as a blunt force tool, then we should at least consider institutionally how we go about interpreting  and making use of the reports it generates to ensure standards and criteria are clear and consistent. I have seen perfectly good essays rejected without a second glance by colleagues for exceeding whatever arbitrary percentage they decided was evidence of plagiarism and absolute classics of the plagiaristic arts skip by without note. ​ This might entail a stronger focus on educating the educators rather than placing all our eggs in the student basket when it comes to such tools.

Anyway, that’s my half-penneth

Regards to all

Liam