By Liz Twentyman (January 14, 2002)

"Perhaps most alarming are indications that plagiarism is quickly becoming part of our educational culture. Students who have grown up with the Internet are often unaware that they are plagiarizing, and some of those who are caught can honestly say they just didn't know any better. We [the staff of www.turnitin.com] see this as a failing of the system, rather than the student, and feel there is a real danger of future generations taking plagiarism for granted."

--turnitin.com website

In response to this new type of online plagiarism, a group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, along with a group of teachers, mathematicians, and computer scientists, created computer programs to monitor plagiarism among students. Originally called www.plagiarism.org, it has expanded over the years, and, now located at www.turnitin.com, is widely used by teachers to prevent plagiarism. Teachers are able to submit students’ papers to www.turnitin.com, which turnitin.com will then compare to online sources and other previously submitted papers. Within 24 hours, the teacher can go online to their turnitin.com account to receive a detailed report. Turnitin.com describes these reports as being "exact duplicates of submitted papers, except that any text either copied or paraphrased from the Internet appears underlined, color-coded, and linked to its original online source." While in the past teachers could only suspect that a certain paper was plagiarized, they can now easily find proof.

While turnitin.com has been doing this service since 1996, George Mason only recently subscribed, at the urging of IB Coordinator Brian Dickson. Dickson had used turnitin.com in the past, and felt that it was worth the subscription fee for George Mason also to subscribe. In doing so, George Mason has joined the ranks of schools such as The University of California System, Georgetown University, and Swarthmore College in using Internet technology to prevent plagiarism. 

Fortunately, George Mason has had different results than UC Berkeley had with using turnitin.com. In 1998, turnitin.com estimated that 15% of a UC Berkeley class had used plagiarized material in their papers; a recent survey of Berkeley students has shown that 30% had turned in plagiarized papers.

Mr. Peloquin, a George Mason social studies teacher who has widely used turnitin.com in his classes, claims that he has not seen widespread plagiarism. "Some papers have been thirty to forty percent plagiarized, but it’s only been because of little pieces of insufficient citation."

George Mason’s teachers have been using turnitin.com in different ways. This semester, Mr. Peloquin has submitted all of his students’ papers to turnitin.com. Next semester, he is planning to have each of his students electronically send their work directly to turnitin.com. "I’m doing this to discourage plagiarism more than anything else."

When he read a student’s paper that was very advanced and contained a style of writing that he knew high school students would have a lot of trouble using, Mr. Hoover, an English teacher at George Mason, decided to submit the paper to turnitin.com to verify his suspicions. The results showed that the paper was highly plagiarized. While in the past he might have had trouble coming up with definite proof that the paper was plagiarized, turnitin.com made it much easier for him to do that.

While this technology is available to all teachers at George Mason, not many have capitalized on it. A recent faculty survey conducted by Lasso Online showed that while 75% of the 24 surveyed teachers say that they are familiar with turnitin.com and other similar online databases, only one often uses them and only two sometimes use them. While not many teachers have used turnitin.com yet, this can be attributed to it being so recently introduced. Teacher Sallie Twentyman, while she had heard about the program early in the school year, says that she only really heard how to use it near Thanksgiving.