Many college students have had instructors who required them to submit their essays through a system called Turnitin. It has become such a norm that it is rare to find a student who has never heard of it.
There are several evident positives to the platform, primarily ones that save professors time and effort in grading papers. Rather than professors having to search through each sentence for copied content, the system acts as an efficient way to check for plagiarism since it automatically compares the student’s work to previously published online documents.
As a result, Turnitin encourages original work for written compositions. The Turnitin website points to the fact that according to an eight-year study, “schools using Turnitin reduced unoriginal writing by 33 percent over the course of the study’s time span.”
However, there are several drawbacks to the system that negatively affect users of the program. Students can be wrongly accused of plagiarizing through the system if the professor does not double-check what the system found as unoriginal. For instance, if someone writes the sentence “there is not enough money to go around” in an essay, it can be identified by the system as plagiarism since those words are found throughout the internet. However, it would not qualify as plagiarism if the student writes that statement by themselves and it fits in the context of their essay.
Although these types of statements are unoriginal, it is not blatant plagiarism. If Turnitin wrongly flags a sentence as plagiarized, and a professor is not paying attention, someone can be accused of violating the rules of academic integrity when they really did not do anything wrong. On the other hand, since Turnitin only identifies online sources, many students who copy word-for-word from a physical book can get away with plagiarism.
Since there is still plenty to go wrong with Turnitin, professors should be vigilant while using it. This is not to say that the program should be banished from the school system, but rather, teachers still need to be mindful and know that an automatic online system cannot be 100 percent accurate all the time.
Yet beyond the logistical pitfalls, the usage of Turnitin conveys a sense of distrust to students, even if they are following all the rules and policies of academic integrity. BU takes academic honesty very seriously, and its guidelines are seen on every syllabus distributed each semester. Students are expected to have the maturity required to follow these guidelines, but the usage of Turnitin implies doubt and uncertainty that college students will do what is asked of them. In this way, the prevalence of Turnitin has subtly contributed to a culture of distrust in academic communities.
BU’s academic culture should not revolve around systems like Turnitin. Not only are students not trusted, but some professors might take advantage of the system by overusing it and relying on it. Ultimately, if Turnitin makes certain teachers not do their job properly, many students can be wrongly accused of breaking the University’s rules of plagiarism.
Instead of students writing compositions with the fear of being flagged by a computer program, professors must use caution when using Turnitin to ease student’s worries of getting in trouble when they really shouldn’t. Creating a more relaxed, comfortable atmosphere in academia will take away this fear, and will ultimately result in more successful work produced.
Brad Calendrillo is a sophomore majoring in English.