Turned In
Today was my first day back “at school.”
Spring Break was longer than originally planned — with an extra week for faculty to get ready to transition everything to an online environment. And while yesterday was technically the first day back, I don’t have classes on Mondays.
It didn’t stop me, however, from jumping into my classes this weekend to get ahead of the game. Although it also didn’t stop me from procrastinating with a visual presentation due today at 3:30pm and a draft of a lab report introduction due at 12. I got most of that lab report done last night and put on the finishing touches this morning, submitting it at 8:59am. Three hours and one minute to spare.
This was my first encounter, however, with an online platform called TurnItIn.
Remember handing in papers in the 1990s? The Internet was still in its infancy, and there wasn’t the magnitude of papers to plagiarize online. I don’t have an exact number, but I assume that in 1995 there were 47 term papers published online, and 43 of them had to do with the intricacies of the Perl programming language. (The other four were just a bunch of lyrics to Blind Melon songs.) So if you had to do research, you actually had to do research. And your professor or TAs would also have to do research to determine if you actually did research or if you had lifted the paper verbatim from different sources.
That’s no longer an issue! TurnItIn is a platform which discourages plagiarism in the same way that Tiger King discourages outrageous hairstyles and body art. It’s become the gold standard for teachers to determine that a student’s work isn’t their own — by analyzing and matching the text of a submitted paper against its database of … well, everything, I suppose. TurnItIn will provide an analysis and report for each paper, the likes of which I will not present here (without proper citation).
Since this was my first biology lab paper, it was my first time using TurnItIn — as there’s a setting in Canvas (our online student portal. Well, everyone’s online student portal…) to have all papers automatically submitted to TurnItIn. The rubric for the paper also talked about the analysis and what it would mean for us:
As someone without TurnItIn experience, the graphic above had me thinking that 20% would be the threshold here. Not anything I’d need to worry about, of course. Because I handed in my own work.
Anyway — I got my TurnItIn results. And it wasn’t a 20%.
35%?!? What does this mean? Is my instructor going to flag my paper as academic dishonesty? What does this mean???
I texted my friend Mia for some help and advice on this very issue. Mia is wonderful: a UMD senior who has been helping me get through this semester. She was one of our youth group kids who has gone on to be a leader herself — and a close friend. She’s studying education and had her own elementary school class. I love her to pieces.
Anyway — I FaceTime’d her freaking out about this whole TurnItIn debacle. She told me not to worry. As long as it doesn’t detect full sentences lifted from other sources, I should be okay.
You see, TurnItIn looks at every single word and compares it to words in other papers. So if someone else uses the phrase alkaline phosphatase, it would strike a mark against me. And since I used that phrase several times in the paper, I was in real trouble:
So — TurnItIn noticed that I cited a source that many others at the University had cited — as it happens to be our lab manual that we were told to cite. But that’s not the real crime here. No — as you can see, I made the cardinal act of plagiarism by using the word “is.” HOW DARE I?!?
So — it’s probably nothing. But it makes me wonder what it would look like had I really plagiarized something. I might take it out for a spin and blatantly plagiarize my own newspaper article or something. I suppose we’ll see how that goes.
If I get thrown out of school I’ll let you know.
