Checking for Plagiarism..turnitin.com?

[Coldblueberry]

How do I check for plagiarism? I'm leading editing/writing for a set currently. I don't suspect anyone or any question, I'm just curious....also the threat of using turnitin could help prevent plagiarism in the first place.

For turnitin, could we possibly upload the entire contents of Sharad's database onto a webpage so it gets "crawled" (or whatever the term is) by the turnitin bot"?

Then submit all the packets to turnitin as a "student.

Or something; maybe this is a dumb idea for lazy people and I should just read every packet there is so I can recognize a copied line. I'm asking here because there might be teachers, teacher's aides, or professors with access to turnitin and... I'll ask my coaches too.

[ryanrosenberg]

I've found Google to be pretty helpful in this. If anything, that would have more packets than the TPDB. Just search the leadin plus "quiz bowl", and it will generally come up if it's on the internet.

[ValenciaQBowl]

I agree with the above advice. I've stopped having my students run essays through turnitin (and other proprietary software my college subscribes to), as one can usually spot plagiarism more easily by simply noting differences between writing style/vocabulary/etc. and then googling specific lines inside quotes.

PS--I share the opinion of Seth Kendall, who once noted that nearly ALL QB writing is essentially plagiarism, as we take information from various sources, including direct quotes, and offer no in-text citations nor Works Cited page at the end of our packets. I wouldn't get too exercised about it unless a writer is literally copying and pasting from a source, which is more a problem of laziness and poor question structure than of academic ethics.

[MathMusic]

One useful thing program our club uses is Viper, along with a local database of old questions. This eliminates any worry of totally stolen questions, and is very useful at detecting wikiplagarism as well. It will hit a couple key phrases now and then that are stock clues, but it helps to be able to see if there is any blatant plagiarism from a single, specific source, especially if verbage is taken straight form Wikipedia.

Also, Viper is also free to use, which is a plus.

Turnitin.com was one that we tried when playing around with different options, but it sometimes failed to detect blatantly stolen questions from old ACF packets. Viper solves this problem if you create a databease of old packets. I use most of the questions from collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com for my local db.

[Coldblueberry]

One useful thing program our club uses is Viper, along with a local database of old questions. This eliminates any worry of totally stolen questions, and is very useful at detecting wikiplagarism as well. It will hit a couple key phrases now and then that are stock clues, but it helps to be able to see if there is any blatant plagiarism from a single, specific source, especially if verbage is taken straight form Wikipedia.

Also, Viper is also free to use, which is a plus.

Turnitin.com was one that we tried when playing around with different options, but it sometimes failed to detect blatantly stolen questions from old ACF packets. Viper solves this problem if you create a databease of old packets. I use most of the questions from collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com for my local db.

Thanks for the help! It's this thing right :http://www.scanmyessay.com/

[MathMusic]

Yep. That's the one.