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Comment by jonnat | Hacker News Reader

My daughter is in 5th grade, attending school virtually due to the pandemic, and she has all her submitted assignments automatically verified by plagiarism checkers. In fact, she's encouraged to use online plagiarism checkers herself before submission to avoid false positives.

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My partner finds it frustrating that she has to edit out “false positives” even when she knows damn well she hasn’t plagiarised.

Editors have to do that already, so if she doesn't have an editor, it probably is her job.

In High School, I did a (very) short co-op copyrighting for a radio station. At the time I thought it was pretty ridiculous that I had to basically reword everything to mean the same thing, but differently. As a grown-up and seeing the same stories in different papers struck me as ultra-lazy, and then I realized why all that copyrighting had to be done.

“Copywriting”, just fyi in case it’s one of those “word I hear but rarely see written” things and not autocorrect.

Thanks.

There is some deeper irony in misspelling that particular word. Indeed the job title was copywriting. But the reason for the position in the first place was to avoid plagiarism and copyright issues.

According to a cursory search, I probably just invoked the wrath of a lot of righters and writers alike. I'm very picky when it comes to grammar and spelling, so I deserve what comes.

How obnoxious. I would hate that too, and would be tempted to refuse. Is that a common thing to do these days? With the seriousness of academic dishonesty charges, I don't see why students would put up with this.

If someone wants to bring meritless flimsy accusations, I wouldn't want to help them do their homework in running down all the accidental matches found by their commercial provider, let alone rewrite my work in the process.

They aren't accusations just match scores. The scores are pretty meaningless unless there's a really good match. Obviously one shouldn't use that alone to determine guilt. Charges are decided by professors and committees, not turnitin. Yes some students might be concerned about the partial matches to the point of anxiety, but the solution is to simply assuage those fears. Because unfortunately, too many others habitually cheat with a misguided confidence that they can get away with it. Not to mention a completely warped sense of the risk versus reward for what they are doing. Making them go through turnitin is a way to dissuade doing that. Letting them see the scores before they submit the assignment is also a nicer way to push back. As opposed to having to hand out F's to get the point across.

> the solution is to simply assuage those fears

The parent commenter's experience suggests that teachers are not doing that; instead, they're encouraging people to rewrite non-plagiarised work so that it doesn't trigger partial matches.

That is my experience too: teachers don't want the hassle of figuring out what a false positive really means.

It's been a minute since I was in 5th grade. I'm trying to remember what kind of assignments I would have had where I could have plagiarized something that would not have been immediately obvious to the teacher.

Only thing I could think of is passing off big brother’s book report as my own. Would a plagiarism detector to work in that situation? Does every report and essay a child writes get added to the database for future works to be checked against?

My mother was a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher in California fifty years ago. She would sometimes have her students write stories, and once one girl turned in a delightful little story that stood out from the others. My mother thought she showed real talent and praised her to the skies, showed the story to other teachers, brought it home and showed it to our family, etc. A year or two later, my mother happened across exactly the same story in a children’s book in the library. It was clear that the girl had just copied her story out of the book. My mother was really sad about the whole thing for quite a while.

Of course it would have been unheard of when I was in 5th grade because our assignments weren't even computer readable. In my day, we were expected to copy articles from the World Book Encyclopedia, and they were graded on neatness.

But my kids both recently graduated from high school. There is a tendency for teachers of each grade to prepare kids for subsequent grades. I can imagine hearing: "They will have to do this in sixth grade, so we're preparing them now" without questioning why it's done in any grade. This makes the curriculum seem more "advanced."

I actually don't think my kids had to use turnitin. At least, I never heard about it. A bigger concern is writing stuff that might be reviewed by employers, law enforcement, and so forth, or subjected to some kind of automated analysis in the future. They've heard about the social credit score. They're all familiar with the lesson: "Don't write anything that you would not want to see on the front page of the newspaper."

I'm lucky that anything I ever wrote in school is now in the bit bucket.

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