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According to a new set of data by Susan E. Schorn from the University of Texas at Austin, Google might actually be better at detecting plagiarism than leading software systems such as Turnitin.
Back in 2007, the university was planning on spending a whopping five-figure sum on a licence to use Turnitin software. Schorn’s research involved creating 23 essays which copied from some of the most commonly cited sources, such as textbooks and Wikipedia, to test the effectiveness of the software. It failed to recognise 39% of the passages which members of the faculty deemed to be plagiarised.
She said that by promoting software that clearly doesn’t work, “in effect, we’re trying to teach them about academic dishonesty by lying to them.”
The university heeded Schorn’s advice and chose to use Blackboard’s SafeAssign software. But this turned out to be even worse, missing 56% of the plagiarised sources. While Turnitin representatives failed to comment, Mark Strassman from Blackboard said that the company has changed its algorithms and web search providers, so that the database is much more thorough.
Google, meanwhile, only missed two of the 23 sources.

In March 2015, UT needed to replace its plagiarism detection software again, and so the tests were reconducted. This time, 37 plagiarised passages were tested, which included the deleted words and reshuffled sentences which students often use to try to hide their plagiarism. Turnitin fully identified 15, partially identified six, and missed 16 altogether.
Susan M. Lang, professor of rhetoric and technical communication at Texas Tech University, said that she understood that inaccurate detection was increasingly likely “given the exponential explosion of information quantities on the net.” But she was also astounded that in 8 years, Turnitin had failed to “improve their performance with false negatives” as well as false positives – things like picking up commonly accepted definitions and popular idioms as plagiarism.
The University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics reminded us that “it is only a tool, not an absolute test.” The software cannot recognise the difference between plagiarism and coincidental similarities, so that decision still lies with the tutor reading the work. The National Council of Teachers of English said that such an automated way of grading “compels teachers to ignore what is most important in writing”, because they become fixated on spotting cases of plagiarism instead of noticing the merits of the work.
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