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Shudder to think: I doubt I would have got through university if then was now. I was way too busy dreaming to even write most of my essays, let alone submit them to the scrutiny of an automated, anti-plagiarism tool online. Back then … well, let's just say the internet was not my go-to study aid. I used my computer — a crummy Macintosh Performa 6400 series — almost exclusively for making rubbish music demos that no one ever heard.
Good job I was a dreamer, though, because I could only have dreamt of lugging that gray tower around Cologne University's equally crummy Philosophikum in my butter-stained, army-surplus rucksack.
No such luck for today's students...
In fact, the tool won't just be like Turnitin, it probably most definitely will be Turnitin, because it's about the world's largest, "similarity check" service company, and it seems to be buying up — or "joining" with — competitors like Ephorus. There are others, of course, such as Urkund and Unicheck.
But whether you're in the US, Kenya, Asia, Australia, the UK, Netherlands, or elsewhere in Europe, like plain old Germany, chances are your faculty will make you use Turnitin.
"Most systems match against the internet and they use third-party search engines to do that," says Turnitin's Chief Revenue Officer, Marc Daubach. "It used to be Yahoo! before it shutdown the service, and now most people use Bing. But we've built our own repository — we've been crawling the internet for almost 20 years now — so we rely on our in-house technologies."
Read more...
Source: DW (English)
