In case you pop into any school or college and ask students to give you their thoughts about the Turnitin check system, you will most likely get negative, biased opinions and comments.
Why? It is because this is software that has lately been of use to curb plagiarism. Turnitin is a software that detects plagiarism by the use of text marching and makes a comparison of a submitted paper against a variety of other papers that are online.
After the comparisons, it provides the originality report that can be accessed by professors and their students. In our review of whether plagiarism checkers are accurate, we noted their pros and cons. But in this post, we focus on Turnitin.
This software will show any match with a paper or academic work that was submitted before.
Is Turnitin reliable?
Turnitin is a reliable plagiarism checker because it accurately generates similarity reports that can be relied upon by educational institutions to make decisions on whether there is plagiarism or not. It does this by scanning text and papers against a large database of text and internet sources and accurately assigning a similarity score with colors that can be interpreted by users.
By doing scans and consistently producing scan results that are accurate to both teachers and students, Turnitin becomes a reliable tool for students, teachers, and colleges.
The size of the software’s database is a bonus to the teachers when they want to nail plagiarized work because it is connected to billions of websites that can easily help to cross-check any work against the submitted one.
This makes it reliable to the teachers should they want to curb plagiarism. For students, reliability comes from the fact that they are able to upload their papers using google drive, desktop, or drop box instead of being forced to copy-paste their work to the program.
Is Turnitin Safe?
Turnitin is safe and secure because it complies with the United States of America, Switzerland, and European Union security standards. It respects individuals’ privacy and therefore protects their personal data and information. It will use the data for lawful reasons but at the same time guard it with care.
Turnitin is not entirely safe when it comes to accuracy, as most people might think. This is because as the software it does not entirely represent efficiency in detecting plagiarism.
As much as it scans through enormous databases of early submitted research and academic papers, obtaining good results is not an indicator that everything is well.
Similarly, negative outcomes do not point to plagiarism by students. Read our guide on whether Turnitin is accurate and learn more on the same.
Does Turnitin store files?
Turnitin has the ability to store and record the submitted assignments in a central database specifically to aid any future searches.
When needed, future submissions such as assignments in the ANU in later years will be viewed against the ones that were previously submitted.
Despite retaining a copy of all submitted assignments, it does not reveal them to other parties and as such, students ultimately reserve ownership rights of their work in the Turnitin database.
Is Turnitin costly?
Turnitin is not cheap. Schools willing to use it will pay a thousand to several thousand dollars yearly in order to subscribe to it and it depends on a number of considerations like features and enrolment of the school.
This money is charged per student in either resource, technology, or tuition surcharge. Should a student decide to pay for the services, it might cost about $3 which is quite an amount.
Generally, Turnitin is not free since anyone who subscribes to its systems is charged through the Turnitin self-check feature and therefore it is paid for and expensive.
A school, for example, has a school Turnitin account and obviously, it has to pay for the Turnitin services.
Schools have the financial muscle to pay thousands of dollars annually as a subscription to Turnitin depending on its capabilities, features, and enrollment and so the bigger the enrollment the higher the cost.
As for students, it can be sort of free because you do not pay directly for it but rather the school allows you to use it when handing in assignments through the instructor’s account that is connected to the school’s account.
Rarely will you find institutions charging students for using Turnitin. If you cannot afford it, check some of the hacks to use Turnitin for free and try your luck on one.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is Turnitin
Turnitin is almost 98% percent accurate based on how it works. Any uploaded material on Turnitin is checked against all work that has ever been submitted through it before.
It then generates a report with a breakdown of your work’s similarities to other works.
It gives percentages of originality by highlighting any matches with the original source.
Turnitin says I plagiarized but I did not
Turnitin will likely say that you plagiarized and yet you did not in the event that you upload a rough copy or rather a draft of your paper early in advance before uploading the final copy of your paper.
This is because this software stores any scanned document in its database and should it find the final submission matching the draft, it automatically flags it off as plagiarized.
This can also come about as a result of configurations made by teachers when they set submission folders.
They can decide to include citations and quoted information in the configurations which probably will lead to higher percentages of matching to other sources hence a higher plagiarism rate.
You will now need to prove that you did not plagiarize by seeking an audience with your professor or teacher should an accusation of plagiarism surface.
How to avoid Turnitin controversy
Turnitin will remain a controversial issue between students and their teachers because for students they would want to write and submit their academic work without much scrutiny while on the other end, their teachers would wish to mark their students’ pure ideas devoid of cheating.
For students, there are a number of tricks that they can use to avoid the Turnitin controversy.
First, one can focus on changing the format of the document by, let us say turning your document from word to PDF thereby adjusting the paper’s structure.
You can go for Macros which can make an adjustment to your paper to an extent that it will be unique to the software and look like an original piece.
Secondly, you can paraphrase your work. This has turned out to be an effective and safe method. Paraphrasing is beneficial because it allows for citations without any worry while also keeping your key ideas safe.
Turnitin only identifies similar sentence constructions but it is not able to take note of paraphrased content which is good news to students.
In addition to that you can order your written paper from a professional writer. You will only need to send the instructions as given by your teacher and wait for the work to be excellently done.
The benefits of this is that you will have an original paper and also it is time saving.
How sensitive is Turnitin
Turnitin is sensitive to documents that match whatever had been previously uploaded in their database.
The software therefore is able to detect these similarities by highlighting using colors to show the similar texts that appear to match.
This will allow the teacher to flag off suspicious areas in the students’ work.
Can Turnitin detect Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is all about expressing the same idea in a different way and so it is one of the easiest ways of avoiding plagiarism.
Turnitin detects plagiarism by comparing the paper submitted to the ones in their online databases.
Top-notch paraphrasing is similar to giving an old idea a new approach. Your work can be more creative and interesting without wasting a lot of time and energy from the original ideas, for sure!
If it is done poorly though, Turnitin will detect plagiarism and therefore you need to have fresh and flowing ideas for you not to be detected.
You can avoid Turnitin trouble by using paraphrasing as a method of removing Turnitin score from your paper and getting an original copy for submission.
Does Turnitin check previously Submitted work?
Software that checks for plagiarism normally stores old papers or work that have been previously submitted. Turnitin also does the same because it stores old papers and work that was previously submitted in its database.
Upon scanning a document, Turnitin will make a comparison between the newly scanned document and whatever is in the database.
Any similarity that is found is proof that the work has been plagiarized. It means that any submitted paper or document will be stored by Turnitin and it will be used to notice similarities in content in the future.
It is apparent that teachers are serious when it comes to curbing plagiarism in tests, coursework, and research papers.
Turnitin provides that platform because it is one of the most efficient for this task. The question is will students fully embrace this software?
