Comment Re:Seems like a good trade-off (Score 4, Informative) 44
What value does Turnitin actually bring?
As a teacher when I was forced to use it, it meant another bureacratic headache and more time assisting students to solve upload and account problems. It never caught anyone cheating which wasn't instantly clear to me upon reading their paper. To me the value was zero.
For students who do not cheat, Turnitin causes additional anxiety and stress. I've been on the receiving end up trying to help my students manage that stress and it sucks. For those who do cheat, its just means that cheating costs a little more by having to pay someone to ghost write, rather than just paying for a pre-written paper. Again I think for students the value is either zero or negative.
Administrators love Turnitin because it creates graphs and numbers which they'll then fashion into reports to justify their enormous salaries. In reality its another expensive case of garbage data in, unreliable analysis out.
There are real pathways to reduce academic dishonesty. An easily fooled piece of very expensive pattern matching software is not it. This is $2 million that would be better spent hiring more teachers and tutors to help students learn.