Wednesday 18 May 2011

Turnitin study on student plagiarism using the internet

Turnitin, the online plagiarism resource used by Pitt,  recently conducted a study that examined which Internet sites students use in their written work. They looked at 40 million student papers submitted to Turnitin over a ten-month period. Some of their findings:
• One third of "matched content" (content that has been copied) is from social networks, content sharing or question-and-answer sites where users contribute and share content.
• 15 % of content matches come from cheat sites.
• One fourth of matched content is from legitimate educational web sites, almost double the number that comes from paper mills or cheat sites.
Wikipedia is the most popular site for matched content (7%).  The other most popular sites, in order, are answers.yahoo.com, answers.com, slideshare.net, oppapers.com, scribd.com, coursehero.com, and medlibrary.org.
• Institutions with widespread adoption of Turnitin see a reduction in unoriginal content of 30-35 % in the first year. By the fourth year, many institutions see levels of "unoriginality" fall by up to 70 %.
You can request a free download the White Paper, "Plagiarism and the Web: Myths and Realities," from the Turnitin website.




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