Plagiarism affects all campuses, but Harvard University’s recent cheating scandal has brought academic dishonesty into the spotlight.
UNC’s pilot program that tested out the Turnitin plagiarism detection software should move forward with making it a campuswide system.
Instructors will benefit from this software, which serves to deter and identify acts of academic plagiarism.
When students submit papers into Turnitin’s OriginalityCheck system, they are crosschecked with an extensive database of online sources and previously turned in papers.
By computerizing the entire process, the program will help instructors identify blatant cases of plagiarism and save them valuable time, while holding students accountable with a fair and uniform standard for detecting dishonesty.
Knowing such a system is in place will dissuade students from taking shortcuts by copying and pasting sentences or even whole paragraphs.
Additionally, students will not be able to plagiarize friends’ assignments from previous years, solving a problem that is much more difficult for professors to detect.
Some students worry Turnitin will put too much power in the hands of professors if they choose to use it for punitive purposes.
As the system does not definitively say that a paper has been plagiarized, instructors will be able to go on a case-by-case basis to analyze the legitimacy of assignments, from term papers to lab reports.
