From 0% to hero (on the essay)

Remember that essay I was writing a while ago ? The results finally came last night (a week later than I expected) and I was shocked to find out that I got a massive 0% on it

Electronic submission was one of the major things that were implemented at the beginning of this academic year, and it was only used for the first year undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses (more or less guinea pigs, but then again I like keeping up with the technology ).

Blackboard is an e-learning platform that most universities in England (and all over the world) use. To dumb it down, it’s the place where lecturers/tutors post all the module materials (PowerPoint slides, podcasts, videos, documents etc.), where you can communicate with fellow colleagues (via a forum and access to emailing all the people on a certain course) and where, since the beginning of this year, you submit your assignments (at least at some courses).

So the TurnItIn system was kind of fitted in the whole Blackboard platform. TurnItIn is this cool system which mainly does 3 things: help determine if the paper submitted was plagiarized or not, provide a framework for grading the paper, and let the tutor give rich feedback on the paper. It determines the plagiarism level by checking your paper against millions of other resources (statistics on their website say they check your paper against 150+ million student papers, 90.000+ journals, 1+ million instructors, 14+ billion webpages etc.) and shows where a specific bit of information came from. After it does all it’s magic, it spits out a percentage that indicates how much of your paper is other people’s work. Tutors don’t take TurnItIn’s numbers as a definitive sign of plagiarism, but they do tend to go the extra mile and find the truth if the system shows a big number.

Now comes the fun part: I went to Blackboard last night, went to the TurnItIn section and there it was, my mark: 0%. Clicked on it and went to the tutor’s comment which went like this “TurnItIn showed a 100% plagiarized score so this is to be treated with suspicion of plagiarism”. I panicked for a second but then I chilled really fast when I realized that TurnItIn said I even stole my own name, tutor and group That was impossible ! I e-mailed the module leader and the next day I got this e-mail from him: “Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I have personally marked your essay and awarded you a mark of 88 per cent. Apologies for the mishap, which was not of my making.” followed by a revised comment on TurnItIn: “Extremely good essay indeed which shows you have researched widely, described the key features of learning and made some thoughtful evaluation of the process, and integrated evidence from some contemporary organizations. Well done!”.

That goes to show that no system is perfect, and that most of the times you can rely on nice people over machines

Thoughts, ideas ? Use the comments section below.

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