Comments on: Attack of the Turnitin Bot

By: RL

RL — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 04:23:45 +0000

I had no problem with my univeristy (postgraduate) having a statement in their consitions that allowed them to use software to detect plagiarism, but when that ‘software’ turned out to be submitting works to an online database, to a company which directly profits from the use of work owned by third parties, there was no way I could continue studying at that university.

By: scott

scott — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:38:54 +0000

I don’t think you’ll get far with a lawyer on this. You might want to go to the provost or other academic authority at your school, however. Deceiving students is never an acceptable thing at reputable institutions.

And yes, turnitin will check everything on the web unless someone tells it not to. You must do this for each individual site, even if it has the same content.

By: PSG

PSG — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:43:30 +0000

I am waiting to hear from my attorney since I just found out that my instructor uses this for this purpose. Until then, I never knew what it was for and the instructor decieved me intentionally not telling me what it is for. I think this is very low and this is a violation of our constitution of Innocent Until Proven Guilty. I pay high tuition rates for them to do their jobs and read and maually check for plagarism. I await my attorney’s phone call.

Also for people with multiple blogs, if they make the same entry into all their blogs, will turnitin check all that too without our authorizations?

By: Turnitin Sued for Copyright Infringement » Computers, blogging, education, martial arts and liberal politics.

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:33:46 +0000

[...] Wow, has it really been three years since I wrote about how Turnitin gives me the creeps? Time flies when you’re raging against the machine, I guess. According to slashdot, some high school students in Virginia are suing the plagiarism-detection service for $900,000 in damages, claiming – as I did three years ago – that the company is using their copyrighted works for financial gain without their permission. If the consensus at slashdot is anything to go by (and it’s admittedly often not), Turnitin may be in some trouble on this one. [...]

By: Mohammad Khatami

Mohammad Khatami — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:55:57 +0000

Thanks for the article. Rather informative.

Note to NSA bot, my name is not mohammad.

By: scott

scott — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:07:23 +0000

Are they doing anything that Google isn’t already doing?

Note to self: Yes. Google cites me (by providing links to the returned content. Turnitin does not cite me or give me credit of any kind.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I totally enjoyed reading about your opinions on this Turnitin stuff. It’s nice to see someone knows what’s going on.

By: Devin

Devin — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

My girlfriend’s high school uses Turnitin, and when she was telling me about it I just got madder and madder. It’s such an invasion of privacy. And further more, don’t we – the taxpayers – pay these teachers to ACTUALLY READ the students’ work.

In my girlfriend’s high school, the teachers that use turnitin don’t really bother to read the papers, they only have other students check them quickly. If a teacher doesn’t read a student’s work then how will he or she know which areas a student needs improvement in. It’s pretty ridiculous.

Today I was reading through my website logs and I noticed the same thing. It’s disgusting. I definitely oppose this horrible service and I certainly don’t want to have to pay for the bandwidth they’re using to crawl every single page on my website – even pages that have no links to them from anywhere. I’m definitely going to put a robots.txt file in my server and I encourage anyone else running their own server to do the same.