An online tool called Turnitin is used to look for possible instances of plagiarism in student work. Turnitin now provides services to more than 15,000 institutions worldwide, up from one million student paper submissions in 2002 to one billion in 2018. The business's main office is in Oakland, California. Additionally, it has overseas locations in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Korea, India, and all of Latin America. According to the company, its software is designed to encourage academic integrity.
In addition to spotting possible plagiarism within a paper, Turnitin can also spot instances of contract cheating, which happens when a student has someone else write their assignment. The tool, called Authorship Investigate, accomplishes this by utilizing forensic linguistic techniques and machine learning algorithms to identify significant differences in writing style among one student's works.
The exclusive software used by Turnitin fosters student authenticity, instructor effectiveness, and improved academic results. Turnitin's products use machine learning, computer vision, and sophisticated artificial intelligence to detect plagiarism in writing and coding assignments, give students immediate feedback, and automate grading for teachers in a variety of subject areas. Over 34 million students across 15,000 K–12 and higher education institutions in 153 countries use Turnitin's products. Turnitin has built an unrivaled database of content used to check for text similarity and confirm authorship thanks to its global reach and network of clients, which includes educational and research institutions, businesses, and governments.
How Turnitin functions
- enables students to check their originality before submitting their work
- gives teachers an automatic report that highlights any instances of work that is similar to or copied
Turnitin asserts that by offering two key services, both teachers and students stand to gain.
- Without actually submitting it, students can upload their work to the Turnithin website to check for areas that need to be revised to prevent plagiarism.
- by having students submit their work through Turnitin, which detects possible plagiarism for them automatically without requiring them to conduct their own research, teachers can streamline their revision and grading procedures.
1. For Students
The software developed by the company finds potential instances of plagiarism when a student uploads a paper to the Turnitin website. The software's algorithm assesses the text against a sizable corpus. A database of web pages, published articles, books, magazines, journals, etc. makes up this corpus. Millions of student essays that were previously submitted are also included in the database. According to Turnitin, this database includes subscription content sources and 165 million journal articles. It also includes over 900 million student papers and 45 billion web pages. A student's essay is permanently stored in Turnitin's database once they submit it. Turnitin can therefore detect plagiarism using both the works of published authors and the work of previous students. By identifying writing-style variations between students' prior submissions, the algorithm can also assess a student's work for originality.
2. For Teacher
Teachers receive a report with the percentage of the submitted papers that match other sources after the papers have been checked by Turnitin's plagiarism detection software. A copy of the student's paper that has been annotated and color-coded with all similar areas is also given to the teacher. Teachers will ultimately decide which of the flagged instances actually constitute plagiarism. Turnitin only facilitates this process by pointing out potential occurrences.
Turnitin's operational strategy
For access to the service, Turnitin charges educational institutions a yearly fee. The service is free for these schools' students to use. The cost of Turnitin is calculated per student. As a result, the cost per year will vary depending on the size and enrollment of each institution.
On its website, Turnitin does not give precise pricing information. The price per student, however, was estimated to be around $2 annually in 2012. An institution with 15,000 students can anticipate paying about $30,000 a year for Turnitin's software, assuming there are no price increases.
Since Turnitin has been cashflow positive since 2004, according to CEO Chris Caren, this business model appears to be profitable for the company. According to reports, the company now brings in an estimated $127.7 million per year.
Competitive environment
Considering that its plagiarism detection service was introduced in 2000, Turnitin has been around for almost 20 years. In order to expand its database, the company has had nearly 20 years to collect fresh sources and student work. The tool is reportedly used by 30 million students from more than 15,000 institutions worldwide, adding to the approximately 929 million student papers in the archive.
Due to its size, Turnitin dwarfs all of its rivals in the anti-plagiarism software market. Although Academicplagiarism has over 30,000 users and Unicheck, a rival online plagiarism checker, has 1 million users across more than 400 institutions, neither can truly compete with Turnitin's global hegemony, which spans over 140 nations.
Turnitin differs slightly from similar services in that it only targets educational institutions as its target market. Academicplagiarism targets both students and schools, whereas Unicheck and Copyleaks focus on personal users, businesses, and educational institutions. Two of Turnitin's main rivals, Copyleaks and Academicplagiarism, both operate on a subscription basis and give users a variety of plan options that allow them to scan a set number of pages each subscription period. Similar to Turnitin, Unicheck bills institutions based on the number of students it serves.
Acquisition of Turnitin
Turnitin might be in for some significant changes soon; Advance Publications bought the company for about $1.75 billion. Conde Nast is owned by Advance Publications, a family-run media conglomerate that also manages and invests in a wide range of technology, media, and communications companies around the world. Industry insiders anticipate that the platform will change under this new ownership.
Before using this feature, we really hopes for you to support us by SUBCRIBE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL and JOIN TELEGRAM GROUP by Click Image below.