<p>i just wonder whether colleges do that or not?? like send it to "turnitin" or other ones..??</p>
<p>Who cares? Just so long as you have not plagiarized your essay you have no reason to worry whether they do or not.</p>
<p>They may. That would be a good way to screen out some applicants.</p>
<p>It's like the iRS--they don't audit everybody but enough to keep the rest fairly honest. And you never know when it might be you.</p>
<p>Since you felt the need to ask this, I sure hope so.</p>
<p>I personally thought colleges will only check an essay adcoms believe may be plagiarized- not the whole bunch of applications or even "random" tests. But, of course, I'm not an admissions officer, so I wouldn't know.</p>
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Just so long as you have not plagiarized your essay you have no reason to worry whether they do or not.
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<p>Because that essay is still under my ****ing copyright, and screw its presumption of guilt. </p>
<p>They can google my essay if they want to. But allow turnitin to violate my copyright? No.</p>
<p>I am strongly against cheating. My school expels anyone who is tried and found guilty of an honor offence. But turnitin is a system that has no honor whatseoever.</p>
<p>By contrast, I think turnitin prompts honor among people who would otherwise be thieves.</p>
<p>Not in the way it has tried to pursue lawsuits for slander against hapless students who were merely expressing their opinions and concern about student copyright. </p>
<p>Plagiarised essays don't match the soul of the application, btw. There are many ways to catch cheaters without violating student copyright. For one, instead of the teachers <em>copying and pasting</em> the essay and in effect plagiarising the essay themselves, they could tag it, highlight certain striking features (using the principle of fair use), write a short summary, and so forth. They could turn the text into a spectrograph such that a text with remarkably the same content would have a waveform with striking similarity (maybe phase-shifted) or a more-or-less unmodified text will show near-perfect similarity in waveform.</p>
<p>I know that if I saw a brilliant essay and was so amazed that I needed to make sure that my applicant was the true author (besides the fact that plagiarised essays are usually quite un-brilliant and lacklustre), it wouldn't take much effort on MY part to create a short summary and tag the essay, treating it like an INTELLECTUAL WORK with the respect a student's INTELLECTUAL WORK deserves, not the factory product of student slaves.</p>
<p>I'm with galoisen on this one. I have no problem with most anti-plagiarism measures and strongly support intellectual and academic honesty, but the turnitin system is heavily flawed, and I strongly resented having to submit my papers to it.</p>
<p>In fact, spectrogram-waveform comparison may be way more useful too, because it easily shows structural, syntactical and lexical similarities. Quite a bit more difficult to detect with a straight-on comparison especially if the student has reorganised the structure a bit. Rearranged syntax will fool the linguistic faculties of our brains, at least at first sight, but rearranging words won't significantly change some numerically-measurable quantities like information entropy (whose affected properties will show up in a spectrogram as well as in other techniques). </p>
<p>And so if the waveform comparison is similar enough, one can then proceed to question the student; only a true author will explain sufficiently coherently for what was behind his or her essay. </p>
<p>Everybody wins with that approach. Of course, the folks at turnitin were probably too dumb thinking it was such a great idea to violate student copyright to even have any ounce of creativity.</p>
<p>Our high school uses turn-it-in.com and we just had to start signing user agreements giving up our rights to sue, etc. in order to use the service. I guess this could be coming from our high school, but more than likely it is turn-it-in's new policy.</p>
<p>The most important thing is to never ever plagiarize or be untruthful in the application. The risk is not so much that you will be rejected by the college, but that you will be accepted, only to be expelled later when your lie is discovered.</p>
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A PHD candidate (friend of mine) was cited for probable plagiarism via turnitin at 50% likelihood or greater. I helped him research that paper and read the final copy. I assure you it was original. Nevertheless, does turnitin lay claim to the IP rights of papers they have cataloged? What if one of said papers turns out to have a component that is valuable, such as a molecular discovery which leads to a cancer break through? Who gets paid?
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<p>Turnitin</a> suit</p>
<p>The suit is baloney.</p>
<p>Arent all the essays given to them in mail? Wouldn't that mean they would have to type the essay? If you are scared, just dont complete an online app.</p>
<p>Well, they print your essay so they can look at it at the adcom table. But if the adcom had doubts they could use some tools really quickly...</p>
<p>in my opinion, turnitin violates the copyrights of student's works. my essay will definitely be my own work, but im against the idea of colleges sending it to turnitin or others..</p>
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in my opinion, turnitin violates the copyrights of student's works.
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<p>A court may rule on this issue eventually. Meanwhile, I would indeed take care to make sure that all college essays are original and not copied from anyone else, whether the colleges check for that or not.</p>
<p>yes indeed, i'll definitely make sure that i do my part as good as possible</p>