My professor told me I MUST register with turnitin.com..

Just got a lovely note from a professor telling me that I MUST register with this site. Turnitin's Originality Checking ensures originality, as well as use of proper citation.

Lovely.

I have lurked here for awhile and I am not about to ask the dreaded question of who is the best and trustworthy. I would like to know which companies are not being used by Turnitin.

Sites like turnitin only compare your work to: (1) material that is already posted somewhere on the Internet and (2) material that has already been submitted to them and retained in their databanks. It has nothing to do with what essay site provides any work if the student chooses to submit it as his or her own work for credit.

Commercial essay sites use their own proprietary software to test their writers' work because once it's submitted to a commercial service like turnitin, it goes right into their files and would get flagged the very next time it's run through. As long as the person who actually wrote the work didn't plagiarize it from another source, nothing that's custom written should ever get flagged; cheaper pre-written essays that have been resold many times are a totally different story, obviously. Any reputable company makes very clear which papers are pre-written and they charge a lot more for custom work.

As you can already guess I was burned on an essay purchasing company because I submitted a pre-written one. Hence why I have to register with turnitin now. The professor was cool about it though...gave me 5 days to write a new one and said he wouldn't report it to the school "this time".

it seems not possible to register to turnitin as a student

my turnitin userid and password was provided by the school. so i guess it is correct to assume that they don't have accounts for students solely?

Your professor cannot force you to use a third-party, commercial service that directly profits from your intellectual property without your consent/permission.

They do - writecheck.turnitin.com.


Absolutely correct! You are the copyright holder and cannot be forced to upload your work to a third-party website for whatever purpose - your explicit consent is required.

Turnitin Authorship Investigations

Apparently turnitin has gotten wind of how professors often suspect that a student may have plagiarized a paper or purchased the paper from a third party source.

Since the professors are apprehensive about filing charges due to their sense of having insufficient evidence with which to charge the student, the professor oftentimes just lets the student go scot free.

It seems that Turnitin has developed a solution to that problem through their Authorship Investigation program which is designed to combat "contract cheating" by proving that the student is not the original author of the paper.

While I am still vague as to how Turnitin can accomplish this task, I believe that they just might be on to something here because of the tremendous size of their previously written papers database.

Comparison writing software could be created to help with this investigation aside from their already existing plagiarism software.

While I am not afraid of what the repercussion of this might be for students and writers, since I have evolved from the academic writing business, I am interested to find out if the company can actually pull this off.

Well, it seems that the company is spinning off into an area that they normally do not care about. Fake news. By partnering with NewsGuard, the company hopes to help students avoid using misinformation in their papers. My question is, how can turnitin and its partner be relied on to not slant the information the students will be verifying through their site? Could politics rear its ugly head and thus, affect the veracity of the results their search returns to the student? Let's face it, the battle is not limited to the truth of the news. It is also based on the politics of the company. That is why I do not believe students should use these services. I mean, even when information from the NYT, CNN, and other news media outlets are questionable, who is to say that the app the group launched will be truthful ? If I were the student, I would take the chance and not use their service. I still say that gut instinct, and proper research on the part of the student is the best way to verify information he wants to use in the paper.

Like I previously mentioed, Turnitin is trying to spin off it's plagiarism software business because it is becoming irrelevant in the modern age of AI writing. While some schools still require their students to register with turnitin, the professors have found that the plagiarism problem is something the students fail to address even after they are flagged for it because the students trust AI to write the paper properly. It even gives them links to the information sources online for the students to double check the citations, rendering turnitin useless when it comes to plagiarism checking. The students can easily edit the paper to avoid that problem, without having to use turnitin.