Introduction
Students in college and university are usually required to perform essay writing and submit research papers. During the completion of these tasks, they are warned about plagiarism. This is the action of simply copying another person’s idea, writing, essay, article, song and masquerading it as your own. Whenever you refer to another person’s material or essay outline, you must paraphrase it in your own words. In addition to that, you must reference it using internal citations and a bibliography right after the essay conclusion. One of the tools that college and university students use to check their work for plagiarism is Turnitin. This tool checks the work to find if there is any plagiarized content. After analyzing the essay or paper, it awards a percentage of plagiarism and the student can then respond accordingly. This analysis tool and writing guide was created by iParadigms.
More about iParadigms
iParadigms LLC is the top provider of online plagiarism prevention solutions. One of its most popular solutions is known as Turnitin. It helps educators and students to perform online peer analysis and grading on a digital platform. They also have another tool known as iThenticate. This one is mostly used in the world of publishing and commercial applications. These tools from iParadigms are utilized in over 100 nations. The company has its headquarters in Oakland, California, USA.iParadigms performed a special study about plagiarism and announced the results on April 28th, 2011. Their outcome indicated that user-generated and social websites are the most popularly plagiarised sources of information. They are closely followed by sites that deal with homework and academic websites. Students have grown more sophisticated in searching for writing inspiration. This is because the study indicated that cheating websites made up less than 15% of the information sources that students plagiarize.
More about the Study
How did iParadims accomplish this study? They did it as follows:
• They classified 110 million matches in content with 40 million student papers submitted to Turnitin over a period of 10 months
• They found that the material in the student papers matched existing archives of more than 14 billion pages of content derived from websites
• Their results were reliable because Turnitin is statistically able to reduce plagiarised content in student papers by 50% to 75%
What were the results of the study?
Plagiarism is now trending in social media
Surprisingly, 30% of all the content which was matched in the iParadigms study was sourced from social websites, Q&A (question and answer) sites as well as writing hooks websites.
Cheating sites are no longer Cool
The study found that students are more likely to plagiarize their essay form from educational websites than cheating sites. As a matter of fact, there were two times more matches in educational sites than those from cheating sites or paper mills which produce essay hook examples. The sites providing essay hacks only showed up in 15% of the matched material.
Wikipedia still rules
Of all the websites on the Internet, Wikipedia is still the number one source of plagiarized content among students. This website on its own comprised a whopping 7% of all matches in the entire study. Other sites that are quite popular for plagiarism include answers.yahoo.com, www.slideshare.net and www.answers.com. Students also refer to www.oppapers.com, www.scribd.com for information that they can simply copy into their academic papers during essay editing.
Conclusion
If you know how turnitin works, you can use it for writing a quality content without plagiarism. It was a unanimous opinion that educators can mitigate plagiarism in institutions signficantly by using the right technologies and tools for the job. As a matter of fact, academic institutions where Turnitin is applied report a reduction of 30% to 35% in plagiarized material in the first year of adoption. By the time the fourth year is coming around, plagiarism in student papers usually drops by 70%. Therefore, lecturers, professors and teachers should utilize Turnitin so as to improve the quality of the student papers. Not only does this reduce plagiarism and foster responsible writing styles, it challenges the students to think critically during the writing process and develop respect for other people’s work.
This article was written by Edusson Community
