Someone's about to receive "The Talk."

Via my site stats, the highlight of my weekend:

That's probably only a "highlight" to someone whose last 48 hours were as unspeakably awful as mine, but there you go.*

*To explain: the above means that Turnitin.com caught a student stealing some of my work on visual rhetoric and that his or her teacher clicked through the link on Turnitin.com and spent ten minutes identifying just how much of my prose was stolen.  And if a teacher has to spend ten minutes evaluating whether a student has plagiarized ...

Comments

[Karl Steel]

Wait. Your student plagiarized from you?

Oh. That's clever.

[Karl Steel]

Or, uh, someone else's student plagiarized from you, and you're seeing turnitin's hits on your site.

You have to wonder what the instructor's going to say about the reliability of internet sources vis-a-vis YOU.

[SEK]

Or, uh, someone else's student plagiarized from you, and you're seeing turnitin's hits on your site.

That'd be the one.

You have to wonder what the instructor's going to say about the reliability of internet sources vis-a-vis YOU.

My "About" page mentions that I've got a contract with a textbook publisher to write a book on visual rhetoric, so I think my ethos is credible enough.

[Annie Em]

I accept blog postings as valid sources, especially when there is an "about" page, and the student writer explains the source's background as part of the context. And heck, at least a blog post is dated, unlike so many even professional sites on the web.

Curious if you ever find out if you were plagiarized or just improperly cited....;-)

[SMD]

I love turnitin. You catch some of the funniest acts of plagiarism that way.

[asdfsdf]

I'm not a teacher and have never used this service (although I may end up a professor someday), so would somebody explain the benefits of using "Turnitin" as compared to, say, Google?

[asdfsdf]

To indulge in cliche, plagiarism imitation is the greatest form of flattery. On the other hand, not sure how...flattered I'd feel about receiving flattery from somebody that lazy.

[SEK]

Turnitin actually uses Google -- that's presumably how they found my post -- but it also has access to all the major academic for-pay databases, so it catches plagiarized material that's locked behind pay-walls. Plus, it does it automagically: students upload their papers, and if they've plagiarized something, it turns up.

[asdfsdf]

My mental gears are turning trying to imagine how it would do that...I suppose it is similar to placing something in the search bar inside parentheses (only returns items with that exact phrase), except it snips excerpts at random. Start with small excerpts [5 word segments where the words are infrequently used ("ontology")], if you receive a hit try the same website with the same excerpt but with a word from either side added on, repeat until you no longer receive a hit, last hit was the largest common phrase. Check to see if there are quotation marks bracketing it, if not and the hit was 50 words long, your client might be *very* interested in what your software has found.

Yep, I'm not an English major. I'm more of a science nerd. I come to indulge my procrastination and my constant search for shallow, meaningless entertainment. Be flattered: your blog is a metaphor for American Public Discourse.

[nutellaontoast]

The only time I caught a plagiarist grading lab reports was the one time this Asian girls' English suddenly got so much better.

Racism wins again....

[nutellaontoast]

And as a follow up, I committed plenty of plagiarism as a student but never got caught because I always just paraphrased in my own words. Never understood why everyone else didn't do that, since it only took a second. I once faked a report by getting someone from the previous year's paper and rewording it.

Students are stupid.