Six Mile Post

Inside September 28, 2004's Issue

-News-

'Six Mile Post' named All-American for 2003-04

New clubs give students options to consider

Earned 'F' regulation now enforced

Floyd students make a difference

Absentee and advance voting offer alternatives

Turnitin.com used as deterrent for high rate of plagiarism

By Sam Chapman
[email protected]
Editor

Those who have been able to slyly get away with making A's by using someone else's work may be in trouble now.

Georgia Highlands College has decided to use a new program, Turnitin.com, that will allow professors to catch students who plagiarize by using copyrighted material without crediting a source. This will hopefully allow more opportunity for professors to assist in teaching students the correct way to attribute information to a source. �It's to promote a culture of academic integrity,� said Dr. Virginia Carson, vice president of academic affairs.

Carson pushed for the Turnitin.com system to be used at the college because of a high number of problems involving plagiarism.

The website allows teachers and students with a class ID number and password to submit papers that will go into the company's database. This database checks the submitted papers word for word against other papers already in the database. The check is completed in a matter of minutes.

Once the check is complete, web sources appear for the matching material. �We used to have to grab the first sentence and Google it, but now this is a good deterrent for students,� said Dr. Simon Grist, director of the Georgia Highlands College Instructional Technology Center and administrator of the Turnitin.com program at the college.

On the site, the professor has a list which includes the student's name and paper submitted. There, colored marks next to the paper title indicate what percentage of the paper was taken from a web source.

The colored marks appear regardless if copied material is credited to a source or not, so the professor must check the paper for attribution.

Turnitin.com is optional for faculty members to use. Currently, 15 faculty members have signed on to the program, according to Grist, who hopes more will sign on to it to make it worthwhile.

LaNelle Daniel, associate professor of English, is trying out the system and thinks responsible students will appreciate it.

�If I did the leg work on a new experiment and research, I'd be fairly upset if someone took it,� said Jennifer Heath, a nursing major from Rome.

The system, Daniel thinks, is not just a trap for students who plagiarize copyrighted material, but �is also helpful for a teacher to help teach students.�

Turnitin.com also provides a way for teachers to see what kind of help some students need, such as knowing how to properly credit a source. �Sometimes students have hard work and an overbearing schedule, and they don't mean to break the rules,� noted Daniel.

Wei Song, a computer science major from Rome, thinks the Turnitin.com program is a good idea. �It's forcing [students] not to steal other people's work,� Song said.

Like Song, Kelly Adkins, a physical therapy major from Rome, supports the new deterrent because it's simply unfair to take someone else's work.

The Board of Regents negotiated with the California based company to use the system, and Georgia Highlands College has paid a flat fee of $1, 685.48 for one year to use it. There is no limit as to how many instructors can use the program, or how often. According to Carson, records will be kept of who uses the program and how often it is used in order to see how successful it plays out for further use.

Georgia Highlands College Home Page

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