Turnitin also needs Turnitin

One of the greatest offences in the academic field is using someone else’s work without acknowledging him/her. Plagiarism is a concept in the academia that refers to copying of another author’s work without attributing that particular work to him. In other words, plagiarism is regarded as the process of stealing someone’s idea or work and […]

One of the greatest offences in the academic field is using someone else’s work without acknowledging him/her. Plagiarism is a concept in the academia that refers to copying of another author’s work without attributing that particular work to him. In other words, plagiarism is regarded as the process of stealing someone’s idea or work and claiming it as the originator.      

The rate of plagiarism or plagiarized works in the world today has risen so much probably due to the fast evolving technology that makes it easy to access other people’s idea on the internet. Plagiarism is as easy as typing whatever you want to know on Google, where the search engine will provide different works written by other scholars. In the same vein, many lazy students and researchers find the internet as an avenue to copy or perhaps steal works authored by other writers and confidently claim it as if they are the originators of such works and ideas.

According to an editorial by a University Publication, IBBUL Trumpet in July,2016, Ursula McGowan of the University of Adelaide, Australia, said “in the online environment of today, downloading information from internet sources and re-using it in an undigested way has become commonplace.”

The editorial concluded that, this explains why some countries and institutions have been wielding the big hammer on offenders as was the case with two German ministers who were forced to resign their positions after their doctorates were voided on account of plagiarism. Many universities in Nigeria have either sacked or demoted academic staff for engaging in plagiarism.

However, in order to restore and maintain academic integrity, many Nigerian universities have introduced online software to check the originality of academic works, be it assignments, research projects and so on. This, to me, is a very good step to curb the menace of stealing from people’s idea without attributing it to them. 

One of the software adopted by Nigerian universities is the Turnitin Anti-plagiarism checker. According to reports by the Turnitin Blog, the committee of Vice chancellors in Nigerian universities has licensed Turnitin for use by students and faculty at all 115 universities in Nigeria effective May 1, 2013.

As a student, I was fortunate to have attended a training meant for staff on how Turnitin works, the resource person, a Deputy Vice Chancellor from Federal University of Technology, Minna, Prof Wole Morenikje said, Turnitin will help know the similarity index, if it finds any work similar to your own which you submitted it will make comparisms and show the results in percentage. In this view it is important to note that, this plagiarism detector does not actually detect plagiarized work but rather identify works that are similar to that of the one submitted.

 Actually to enroll your work into the software, you need to be registered or have someone who is registered with the website to enroll the work for you. After running in your work, the processing takes about 24hours before the result of the similarity index is ready. The result however comes in percentage of which many universities have its own respective cut off marks.

That is not the case; the problem here is that, this software has been used as yardstick to grade students. To me, that doesn’t seem right because even the software itself is ineffective. I remembered I mentioned, similarity, so this software, consistently detect even if is a work that is quoted with proper referencing, Turnitin will joyfully detect it as if it is it is not acknowledged. 

In another view, if Turnitin is still going to be used to check plagiarized work, more intelligent features should be incorporated to make it more efficient and effective. Features like ability to detect works that are not acknowledged not works that only look similar despite the acknowledgement (which is how it works). 

In this regard, am calling on academicians and other stakeholders in the education sector to partner with the Turnitin company that houses about 30 million students in about 150 countries of the world so as to proffer solutions to the lapses of the software. 

Abdullahi Yusuf Tela, Minna, Niger State.