Teacher turns to tech to stop cheating

Writing a term paper and thinking about borrowing one that already got someone else an A, or at least is geared to deliver a mere passing grade?

For some California high school students, that dodgy maneuver now means reckoning not just with the sharp (or tired) eyes of the teacher, but also the algorithms of a Web-based plagiarism sniffer.

San Mateo High School is trying out the services of Oakland-based Turnitin.com, according to a report from CBS station KOVR-TV in Sacramento. (Note: CNET News is a unit of CBS Interactive.) Students are asked to submit their essays online, and their work is then compared with what's on the Internet.

"It's a good way to kinda catch kids who use their brother's papers from previous years. That's the best resource. Or maybe someone had a similar assignment in another class," English teacher Nels Johnson told KOVR.

Colleges including the Cal State system have been using antiplagiarism tools for years, but high schools are just starting to use it, KOVR reports. How long San Mateo High uses Turnitin remains up in the air--it had to pay $9,000 for the service this year, and in a recession-weary economy, that may simply prove too pricey.

Local Video from CBS13 in Sacramento

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[jumpjetta]

My wife's high school near Austin, TX has been using the anti-plagiarism site turnitin.com for at least two years. I believe all their high school English students are required to pass their papers through the site.

Way to be cutting edge in the reporting, CNET.

[wowza3]

This is so incredibly not news. I did this in high school over 5 years ago. This is NOT new and this school district is definitely not the first to do this. Agree with jumpjetta, do just a little research before you report something as 'news.' This is exactly the influence I knew would come with the idiots at CBS running the show here.

[Prof_K]

Why is everybody focusing on who did it first and not on the idea itself. Turnitin and other similar products rock! This product saves me countless hours googling phrases or trying to remember where I had read something before. I have used anti-plagiarism tools for several years at the community college, and I'd love to see our local high schools begin using them so that I wouldn't have to fail students who think they can get by with cheating. Maybe if a few more were caught in high school, they would learn not to use someone else's work.

[johnnyangel]

Turnitin does not work at all for quantitative courses. And what is worse, students know it. I teach Corporate Finance to undergraduate business students. Most of the coursework, including essays and papers, requires use of applied mathematics and statistics. After accepting this teaching assignment, I found that the instructor's solutions manual had been distributed electronically to several students (I knew this because the manual had errors and students were repeating the errors verbatim in their assignments). But when I submitted the assignments to Turnitin, it found none of the errors.