Some students believe that they can “beat” Turnitin by employing various tactics. Instructors should rest assured that these tactics do not work as our algorithms take such “tricks” into account. In addition, the best practice for ensuring that students are not able to “beat the system” is to review all Originality Reports – regardless of the percentage shown as the Similarity Index. Instructors who look at the Originality Reports will be able to tell if something untoward has occurred.
What tricks do students try?
One trick is to replace a common character like “e” throughout the text of their paper with a foreign language character that looks like an “e” but is actually different (for example, a Cyrillic “e”). This method does not work because our algorithms replace such characters with the corresponding standard English character. The special character will still appear in the Originality Report; however, the word it is in will have been matched against words containing every character that looks like that character. This allows us to show you matches to words with both the special character and the standard character.
Another trick (touted by a video on the web) is to use Word Macros to disguise copied text. This method also does not work since Turnitin’s algorithms strip macros from Microsoft Word Documents for Word 2003 and below. When we strip a macro from a Word file, whatever character the student originally had in the file will appear. For instance, one of the videos recommends starting with a “~e” and replacing it with a standard “e” using macros. When we strip the macros the “~e” will appear in the paper. This means the “~e” will appear in the Originality Report, GradeMark, and the file available for you to download from the service. For Microsoft Word 2007, we don’t accept macros-enabled (.docm) files (we do accept the standard .docx files).
Another method consists of replacing all the spaces in a paper with invisible (white) text. This also does not work since Turnitin will not accept papers that appear to have this condition based on abnormal word lengths. In addition, the text-only Originality Report displays all text regardless of the color used by the student.
A fourth possible trick is to put quotation marks around the entire document. This does not work because Turnitin does not automatically exclude quoted material. Only the instructor can change the default setting to exclude quoted material from Originality Reports. The Originality Report would also show the quotation marks at the beginning and end of a paper in the same size text as the rest of the paper. If the instructor chooses to exclude quoted material, Turnitin displays a warning when a large percentage of a paper appears within quotation marks.
The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis to make the Originality Reports more accurate and informative. As an instructor, your best defense is to ALWAYS review your students’ Originality Reports – even for Similarity Indexes shown as zero. All of the “tricks” discussed here rely heavily on the idea that the instructor will not look at the Originality Report. All attempts to game the system become pretty obvious when the instructor examines the Originality Report. So make a quick scan of each Originality Report part of your standard practice when evaluating papers.
Amazing the lengths that students will go to in order to cheat. If only they would apply themselves to actually doing the work themselves.
Can’t students just substitute with thesaurus synonyms on the plagiarized work and shuffle the grammatical structure a bit so that it still makes sense but is just worded differently?
Turnitin is working with Language Weaver on integrating very sophisticated translation technology that will provide better “fuzzy” matching for paraphrased text. Paraphrasing is an excellent skill to learn but you still need to cite your sources and use some of your own thoughts
what about making the text of an online paper a jpeg with a the windows screenshot tool thing or whatever and then making the paper a giant image of text which will be indistinguishable to a human but just an illegible image to your computers.
Submitting an image-based document has certainly been tried by many students. Instructors currently view the results as a text-only, which in the case of using a screenshot, would result in a blank document. Our new release of Turnitin2 will retain full formatting of the student paper, but will also notify the instructor of abnormal formatting, prompting them to look at the original document or text-only format.
I once compared a paper to a Wikipedia article on the same topic. It was obvious to me that the student had copied the article and then rephrased every sentence. Would your software detect that?
Hi Wes. Like I mentioned above, Turnitin is integrating translation technology that will provide better matching for paraphrased text – including word substitution.
I use turnitin and have a problem when it finds matches to other students’ papers who seem obviously to all be copying from the same source. But turnitin doesn’t give me the original source they are all copying from, and without that, there’s not enough evidence to identify a plagiarism.
Turnitin2 (due out later this summer) will allow users to “drill down” into multiple sources giving you more complete information about matches so you can determine if the matches are problematic or not. For instance, if you see that a paragraph of text matched 22% to another student paper; then you could expand that source and find that 19% was actually from Wikipedia; then looking further you’d find that 13% was actually from a specific publication.
Here’s one that – hopefully – will stump you: foreign language papers. Imagine a paper written in French (or even less common language, for that matter) and then translated into English (via automatic translation tools like Google). Would you catch that?
Hi Drew. By the end of the year, we will have that functionality. iParadigms announced a partnership with Language Weaver that will enable the identification of translated plagiarism.
View the PDF of our announcement: http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/sales/Turnitin_RELEASE_050710_Language_Weaver_Partnership.pdf
I wanted to know whether turnitin can detect plagiarism if the written document is submitted in pdf format??? Please let me know. Thanks/
Turnitin accepts text-based PDF files, but will not accept scanned or image-based PDFs.
Is there any possible way of submitting work to check the students work before hand? For example a student may come to you with a literature review and you want to some feedback on it before they atually hand in their main assignment for a sepcific deadline. I would sometimes like to check for plagarism at this point but will the system not just say that they are both the 2nd piece is plagarised from the 1st.
@Steve – There is an option to set-up revision assignments in Turnitin, which will allow students to submit multiple drafts without overwriting previous drafts, and they will not be saved into the Student Paper Database.
I’m concerned that turnitin is missing some considerable content from essay mills. In a bored moment, I did some research about mechanical turk, where there are quite a few $0.01 paid tasks which ask the responder to rewrite a particular sentence. Being an academic, I said “ah ha, that’s how the essay mills are doing it.” Because of course, you could get someone to write the essay once, then get the MT services to use 100 different underpaid authors to rewrite content and thus be able to spin it quite a few more times. I could be wrong, but this seems to me that this type of rewriting would be in ways quite different from a simple letter replacement or whatnot.
@Erica – There are limits to what Turnitin can do. We do not have much content from ‘essay mills’ which is one reason to compare papers against the student paper database. Persuming, the essays being sold are sold to multiple people over the years, these papers would eventually enter the Turnitin student paper database and future papers would get flagged.
Erica, what you are describing is a custom written essay, which would probably fair as good of a chance as a student-written essay. We’ll be employing better paraphrased matching within the next year or so, but there are limitations with that triggering more false-positives.
Its important to remember that Turnitin OriginalityCheck is not a cheating detector; it is a plagiarism prevention and originality checking tool that checks for textual similarity. As instructors, administrators, parents, peers, and citizens we still have a responsibility to teach honesty, integrity, and ethics.