I've actually used turnitin.com in my student-teaching days. I was teaching how to write research papers, and so the majority of the students were scouring information from books, not the Internet. Turnitin.com did not detect any plagiarism because it only scans for Internet resources, but that didn't stop me from wondering if any of the students were copying straight from the books they used.

(I don't know why my email is bouncing back, but there is another. --GRG)

As with any technological solution, finding the right tool is only part of the battle. If we design "canned" essays and don't ask students to submit notes and drafts, it's much easier for students to plagiarize.

I think every teacher has an amazing story to tell, about the student who printed a paper off the Internet (with the URL on each page) and simply signed the first page; or the student who plagiarized verbatim from the book I had just checked out the week before. (I cracked the spine on that book -- it was imacculate when I returned it to the library. After the book showed up in the catalog again, I checked it out again, and the student had even underlined the passages she copied into her paper. The student had already been accepted into a graduate theology program, and it was spring semester of her senior year.)

As with any technological solution, finding the right tool is only part of the battle. If we design "canned" essays and don't ask students to submit notes and drafts, it's much easier for students to plagiarize.

I think every teacher has an amazing story to tell, about the student who printed a paper off the Internet (with the URL on each page) and simply signed the first page; or the student who plagiarized verbatim from the book I had just checked out the week before. (I cracked the spine on that book -- it was imacculate when I returned it to the library. After the book showed up in the catalog again, I checked it out again, and the student had even underlined the passages she copied into her paper. The student had already been accepted into a graduate theology program, and it was spring semester of her senior year.)

University professors have a heavier task of evaluating 200+ papers, even with the help of assistants. As a high school teacher without assistants, I have to read every single paper submitted. There is an advantage to that: familiarizing myself with the student's writing style and the average lexicon used by a high school student. After that, spotting plagiarized papers becomes easier when their vocabularies jump up a notch and their grammar and punctuation becomes stellar.