Turnitin is a process that is annoying and oftentimes, can be troublesome. If you turned a paper in once before, and decide to use it for another class, ultimately the entire paper is plagiarized regardless of whether it was written by you.

Also, the process should be focused more on literary works and articles to search for plagiarism than another students’ paper. Teachers hand out the same types of writing essays each year, so how is it possible to not “plagiarise” another person’s paper that you haven’t met but done the paper years before, but have the same criteria and have a lower “originality” level.

I give props to these kids for doing this and being clever enough to say “Hey, you’re using our papers because we’re forced to give them to you. Their our work.”

Just cause it’s another lawsuit, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t done before in other means. It’s just using the system to your own need, and saying “You’re kinda in the wrong”.

Now, some of our under-performing students have discovered the hollywood (intentionally not capitalized) and corporate America secret – the path to riches lies not in hard work, education and cultivation of skills; but rather in use of lawsuits.

The service that TurnItIn provides enhances the educational process by getting our ignorant, lazy behind kids off their duffs and actually making them work. These twerps think their work is worth $150K per paper – yeah right. You would have to pay ME $150K per paper to read them! Next these imbeciles will want to get paid per math problem or science experiment. And we wonder why China, India and many other countries are kicking our butts academically.

I’m afraid the comments about this lawsuit (and about the article) are bent toward “I don’t want (my child) to be caught cheating … I want them to cheat undetected”.

I also believe that if you are submitting a paper for a grade you have no say on how it’s graded. If you don’t want to have your paper used, don’t submit it. Of course, you won’t pass the course … but a lesson will be learned none the less.

I won’t get into guessing what happened, or why … I’ll read about it later. I think the technology (and that’s what this blog is all about … technology) behind the software is wonderful, as is the actual software use. I’ll let the lawyers discuss whether the students actually had the right to refuse their papers inclusion in the database, or whether they assigned a copyright that is unenforceable.

Rick