Turnitin is an Internet-based plagiarism-detection service. Typically, high schools and universities purchase licenses to submit essays to the Turnitin website, which checks the documents for originality. According to U.S. News & World Report rankings, about half of the top high schools and nearly two-thirds of the top universities in the U.S. use the service.Due to the large amount of data
. available on the Internet, students may be enticed to simply copy work from a website, reformat it and submit it as their own. Turnitin uses a variety of algorithms to search for key subject matters and key phrases in the text to detect a similarly-worded document on the web. The results returned by the service can be used to detect plagiarism or can be used to help students learn how to avoid plagiarism and improve their writing.The service has not gone without criticism. Some schools require students to submit essays directly to Turnitin, which critics of the system say constitutes a presumption of guilt. In the mid-2000s, two students at McGill University in Montreal refused to submit their work directly to Turnitin and took their grievance public. Ultimately, the students were allowed to have their papers hand-graded. Some universities, such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford, have banned the service completely after other students refused to submit their original work to Turnitin. Additionally, critics have alleged that use of the software violates educational privacy and intellectual property laws.Turnitin is not a free service. At the company's official website, schools are encouraged to submit information to receive a call from a Turnitin sales representative to discuss costs. The company states that the reason there is no set cost is because each institution has different needs, requiring different services. There is a free Turnitin alternative called Viper at http://www.scanmyessay.com/turnitin.php. The site states that its features are comparable to Turnitin. More reference links: https://turnitin.com/static/index.php http://www.plagiarism.org/
