Or the killed net neutrality? I use Turnitin -- Turnitin's plagiarism report is worthless. It relates the snippets of identical text to other student's papers, not the original text, and one has to request information about the paper from the instructor. How is that USEFUL? I copy and paste text into Google Scholar, Yahoo, and Edge and get garbage --- no original sources, but ads for paper mills. What is going on? --Krabby Kathy
Well, that's an absolute comment, and one that doesn't reflect my experience. It is true that, maddeningly, sometimes Turnitin matches another student's text rather than an original. That typically means both students have independently copied the same original language (hey, at least they didn't collude). In those cases--unless the other student popping up in the originality report was my own--I do not bother to request access. When I have Googled the suspect snippet--and of course, we all recognize professional style when we see it--the results have taken me to the correct original source.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure what's going on with these essay mill ads you are seeing unless the text is somehow matching what is in the mill? Or perhaps some little popup spawner has made its filthy little hive in your browser somewhere and is somehow triggered by Googling professional language? All that said, I do think that TII's preference to match a student source and ignore an original on the Internet is really exasperating.
It makes me...crabby.
I've been wondering how this kind of technology will wrongfully incriminate the products of the "accountability" era in public education.
ReplyDeleteOur current students were wired to catch on to patters, memorize recipes, and produce prescribed responses detail-for-detail.
They are no longer beaten with that **** in OUR classrooms, but that is what they were built to do, so it doesn't matter that we're not asking them to do it anymore.
They will latch onto the recipe and cook it up and not even realize they're doing it.
Their answers don't sound the same because they're copying from each other.
Their answers sound the same because they are all equally poor at writing and they all have equal faith that they should be using an algorithm - and it's tacit and ingrained and will be very hard to turn off.