Turnitin to Advance

I just now find that Turnitin is being acquired by Advance (the parent company of CondeNast, parent of The New Yorker)!

Here's a link to the article.  The article includes some analysis of Turnitin both as a product, and as a business, so it is a good overview of the issues. 

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-06-turnitin-to-be-acquired-by-advance-publications-for-1-75b

Yes, as a teacher and parent I bemoan the need for something like Turnitin (i.e. plagiarism detection), but recognize its helpfulness in the classroom.  To their credit, Turnitin long tried to disavow the term "plagiarism detection" and instead focus on its quasi-LMS functions surrounding the "similarity analysis".

 

They had started to add grammar-checking as well, which would I think further legitimize the whole tool, and speed students' development of writing ability.  Yes, of course every student's every sentence should be read and commented-upon carefully by the teacher; but that is not practical -- schools commonly grant English composition teachers extra time in their work schedule because of the expected extra time required for commenting on student essays.  In my teaching experience, I found that even basic spelling and grammar-checking tools were quite helpful in allowing students a preliminary screen of their work; and those tools that applied a numeric score were even better, as they engage our natural human competitive drive to beat a specific score.  Even if the effort to improve the score is intuitive -- that is, the student may not recognize the specific grammar or style improvement -- the student learns inductively how to improve any essay.

 

Unfortunately, Turnitin's LMS functionality was rather rigid -- for example, deadlines were absolute, while in the real world deadlines are rarely zero-based.  That is, even aside from good ex-post-facto excuses, there are often pre-granted individual or group excuses.  In addition, the paper turned in 1 minute late is patently different from a paper turned in 1 week late, and is usually treated differently.  

 

Of course, spell-checkers are famously deaf to idioms and other linguistic nuances, and grammar-checker are as well.  We still need, in the end, an experienced human to interpret and evaluate the essay -- but that person's time can be best spent on that "last mile" of meaning and style, allowing the student to independently work on writing before another person sees it.