I see that it apparently does search through many of the kinds of online sources my students are likely to plagiarize from, so I take back my comment that it would be useless in my situation. Still it strikes me that the problem is better addressed by us doing a better job of teaching students what they're supposed to be doing than by us catching and penalizing them after the fact.
 
I also think that this is a place for one of those outreach projects to other levels of education. It seems clear that a significant part of the problem is that we not only fail to teach this properly to students, but that at some levels the use of sources is sometimes taught exactly the wrong way, with students essentially told that their job is to find relevant quotes and string them together. What exactly do we know about how our students are taught about this earlier in their academic careers?
 
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Roig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 10:33 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences
Subject: Re: Caught Cheating

At 05:27 AM 5/4/2004 -0500, you wrote:
"The most serious limitation of turnitin.com is that it does not check
scientific references - that is journal articles (at least it didn't use
to).

Yes, but their capabilities are expanding.  I plucked the paragraph below from the Turnitin web site http://www.turnitin.com/static/about_us/whats_new.html:

"Best Search Available. Turnitin has expanded its search capabilities to include the articles from thousands of commercial publications. This includes all of the published material contained in ProQuest�'s ABI/Inform, full-text Periodical Abstracts, and Business Dateline. It also includes tens of thousands of books from some of the largest digital libraries available. This is a free service to new and existing Turnitin customers."

I understand that the above feature was only added recently.

Miguel

___________________________________________________________________________
Miguel Roig, Ph.D.                              
Associate Professor of Psychology               
Notre Dame Division of St. John's College       
St. John's University                           
300 Howard Avenue                               
Staten Island, New York 10301
Voice: (718) 390-4513
Fax: (718) 390-4347
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm
On plagiarism and ethical writing: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/
___________________________________________________________________________
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