With the internet and its information at the disposal of any student with a computer and a connection, plagiarism has become a growing concern in universities. While the opportunity to plagiarize is easier than ever, the possibility of succeeding with the plagiarism is decreasing significantly with the invention of automated plagiarism systems.

When it comes to automated plagiarism systems, there is much debate over the dependability of the systems. The most popular of these systems are Turnitin and SafeAssign. The original worry for these programs was their ability to identify plagiarism consistently, universities being more concerned with the systems catching potential plagiarism than perhaps even the content of the paper. As these programs are becoming more popular in universities around the nation, skepticism has begun to arise on the fidelity of the products.

Two ironic situations emerged when a study was conducted for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which helps to govern such things as plagiarism. The study took place at Texas Tech University, in which they compared the two programs against 200 term papers from their students. Turnitin discovered more plagiarizing irregularities than did SafeAssign, but that may not have necessarily been a great accomplishment for Turnitin. The first of the two ironies was that the study found that Turnitin was a little too vigilant in its search for plagiarism, flagging enough of a paper that it would find a percentage even in this spontaneous blogging debacle. Despite this, Turnitin was advocated by several universities at the conference, leading us to our second irony. Turnitin had provided financial compensation to several participating universities for them to promote their product over their competitors. A company that provides a virtuous service doing slightly underhanded deeds is ironical to me. Despite this financial conduct (it was spoken about openly, so I won’t go as far as to say misconduct) and its excessive search for plagiarism, Turnitin is an effective tool against plagiarism and should continue to be refined as opposed to dismissed.

Despite the consistency or dependability of automatic plagiarism systems, be respectful. Don’t copy copy.