I've just been volunteered by my university to look into the cost- effectiveness of subscribing to a plagiarism detection service, such as turnitin.com.
Naturally, I turn to you people for advice. I just browsed their website. It seems to me rather complicated to make use of, although I suppose it gets easier once you understand how it works. But I would think this would limit the number of instructors who would be sufficiently motivated to make use of it in their courses. They offer three options for subscribing: individual, department, or university-wide. However, they were rather coy on pricing, and you have to submit a request to get this information (which I haven't yet done). It seems to me that what they claim as their primary function-- detecting passages plagiarized from the Internet--can be easily duplicated without all the associated bother and expense just by typing a few suspected passages in quotes into Google. This works great, actually. So the question is: do they offer anything more? They also maintain a database of papers submitted to them for analysis. However, my guess is that this would be valuable only if recyling of papers (handed on from one student to another) are a concern, and would be effective only after a university had subscribed and submitted many papers to their database. One benefit I thought they might have would be the ability to look within the databases of papers-for-sale sites, which Google wouldn't be able to access. In other words, I thought that perhaps they could detect purchased papers as well as those freely available on the Internet. But I don't see that they make this claim so it's probably not true. Bottom line: I'd like to hear (publicly, preferably) opinions on this, particularly from people who have used turnitin.com or a similar service, particularly at a small university such as ours. Is it better than googling? Is it worth the hassle to use it? Is it worth the price? Please tell. Stephen ______________________________________________________________ Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips _________________________________________________________ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
