Turnitin.com

It is used also in college and graduate level courses.  I am wokring on a MS degree in Proj Management and am require, for certain courses, to hand in papers through turnitin. 

I was told the program would try to match sentences in your paper with anything that is searchable on the internet.  My work had not been flagged so I don't know.  It seems to me if the student copy something word-for-word then it would be easily detected.  But if the sentence is re-phrased it would be ok.  I guess that's the idea of doing research: you read something, understand it and should be able to describe that idea using your own words, instead of quoting everything. 

I don't believe turnitin would replace the teacher in grading paper.  It's there to help catching petential plagerism.  It's ultimately the teacher's judgement - if quoting words are necessary then your daughter should receive some credits.

I use it for the the classes I am currently enrolled in.  The professor just indicated that all sources must be referenced.

We use it, or other versions which use the same engine, all the time.  FYI I work in scholarly publishing where plagiarism is a very serious (and frequent) occurrence.  I'm also currently getting my masters degree and have to turn my own work in.

As others have said, the software just matches text, and sometimes does not pick up on sections which have been cited.  Did your daughter cite the source of the data in the tables?  It's something a teacher would know just by looking at the turnitin report.

15% seems pretty low to me.  FYI last semester I had the system show one of my papers with a high score because I'd not cited a section properly.  The irony was I was notified by my professor a week before I was due to give a talk at a conference on the subject of plagiarism.  Once I discussed it with my teacher it was easily corrected.

I hope like anything people use it as a tool and not set in stone. 

I know when I was going to college people using papers found online was huge.   I understand they have to do something to try to curb it.

I use turnitin.com for my classes as well.  Have you looked at turnitin's Student report?  This report will show you the breakdown of each source and show the direct/indirect matching.

Here is the link to how turnitin.com uses the originality report:  http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/student-training/viewing-origina... It has a great video that explains the whole process.

If she direct quotes from a website, the website's name will pop up.  If she didn't use proper quotations, this will increase her % score.

I wouldn't be worried with a 15% matching at all.  I just had a 20% match on a paper I just wrote and I KNOW I didn't just cut, copy and past my report. 

I just wanted to say thanks for the feedback on the turnitin.com. This morning there was a meeting between myself, my wife, and daughter, and the school's dean of students, vice principal, and the teacher.

The paper in question was a 14 page paper on statistical probabilities of dice throws. The parts that were flagged for plagiarism were data tables, formulai, and calculations. With verbal content their was no statistically significant matching. This paper is something that is called an internal assessment. Internal assessment is such that no external sources are to be used, so no external sources can be quoted/sighted.

The shocking part to me was the teacher involved only looked at the turnitin.com % matching and did not read the paper. If he would have taken the time and made the effort to consider the content this whole mess would have been avoided. Meanwhile the marks for academic dishonesty are being reconsidered (my guess is it would have been too much of a loss of face to remove them on the spot).

I fully understand the benefits and the needs of systems like these in todays world but strongly recommend that those tangled up in its outcome to understand the nature of the beast and follow up if unfavorable outcomes are a result. 

Update- School has agreed to remove the academic dishonor mark in the daughter's file. Detention cancelled.

Next up my appointment with the school principal and letter to the board to have this teacher at a minimum sanctioned if not outright fired.

Man, when I was in college, they used to say there was something like this, but we all knew it was bull.  Looks like someone went and invented it.  Huh.  Man, kids have it rough today.  Automatic plagiarism detectors, GPS in cars where parents can track location, speeds, etc...  Man oh man..  I seriously dodged a bullet...