
Copycats Beware: Turnitin is Coming to a College Admissions
Office Near You
Most college students are all too familiar with Turnitin.com, an online application that professors use to detect plagiarism. At last count, nearly 800,000 instructors had used the system to check 125 million student papers
for improperly used content or quotation errors. Turnitin analyzes whether students are doing original work by crawling billions of web pages and some 90,000 journals, periodicals and books looking
for duplications.
Soon the system will use similar tactics to check
for plagiarism in college admissions
essays. About two dozen universities are testing the new Turnitin
for Admissions, which checks
for duplications of previously submitted
essays and personal statements. “What we don’t do is call plagiarism out,” Jeff Lorton, business manager at Turnitin
for Admissions told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “What we do is give people a tool to show matches, and it’s up to that admissions
officer to look at that document and make a determination.”