There are a lot of services that allow checking for plagiarism. Turnitin is one of them. At first, this service was known as plagiarism.org. It was used by educational institutions and teachers. Now, this service is commercial and you need to register. Teachers and professors submit the students’ projects to this website and obtain results. During the check, the program compares the work to the large database of online sources, texts and students’ works from different universities.
Turnitin is considered an essential tool for professors. Students, on the contrary, may dislike it. The primary goal of using this website is to detect cheating and plagiarized content. Students often write essays and other writing assignments. They often need to use data and sometimes it’s necessary to bypass the Turnitin’s algorithms.
To be more exact, we cannot even call Turnitin a plagiarism checker. It is a program that compares a student’s paper with its vast database of scientific books and academic papers. As a result, it provides the percent of matches between texts. The teacher has a final word about whether the paper is plagiarized and copied or not.
Turnitin determines the presence of plagiarized content in the following way. It provides a report where the content with matches is marked by a color. One more result that is determined is the percent of matches and the whole text. Students should know beforehand that this check is subjective. Even if the result is 1% of matches, an educator may determine an assignment to be plagiarized. All results below 15% of matches are not considered plagiarism and can be accepted. It’s up to the teacher to decide, though.
How Does Turnitin Work?
Turnitin is one of the most popular plagiarism detectors. It is used by many educational institutions helping to avoid plagiarized content. Its use has significant benefits, such as a vast database, simplicity of use and effectiveness.
Some of its algorithms are similar to other plagiarism detection programs. Usually, a teacher uploads a student’s paper to the Turnitin website and. The program analyses all parts of the document. It detects whether there are matches with any sources from the database. If there are similarities or matches the program highlights them. As a result of it all, the system calculates the level of the paper’s uniqueness (in percent).
The teacher defines the settings according to which the service will detect plagiarism.
The settings of Turnitin may allow finding matching parts of the text that are longer than the given amount of words. It means that if a quote contains fewer words it will not make the level of uniqueness lower. This setting (as well as some other) is a loophole that allows students to cheat Turnitin.
To bypass Turnitin algorithms it’s necessary to comprehend how it works. Its database is huge and includes internet content, books, newspapers, journals, and assignments of other students.
The Turnitin website uses matching-algorithm technology. The program searches for strings of words and phrases that are similar to the one from its database. When the teacher uploads your paper, the Turnitin bots begin to thoroughly check your essay. Every sentence and everyone is checked for similarity with texts from the database.
It doesn’t usually take much time to thoroughly analyze the paper and provide matched parts that look like plagiarism. It’s difficult to cheat this program, but it is not impossible you know several certain cheats.
Tips on How to Beat Turnitin in 2020. Methods that Are Reported to Work
In case your work doesn’t pass the requirements, your teacher can put you on the list of students who plagiarize papers and that is a serious offense and may have far going consequences. Questions arise “How to avoid it and is it possible to cheat Turnitin?” In this article, you will find several methods of cheering Turnitin that are reportedly work in 2020.
Cite the sources
The legal way to use somebody else’s work and don’t get penalized is to cite properly. If you provide a reference for the cited text in your list of references, it will not be detected as plagiarism. You can give a reference even if you paraphrased or synonymized the text.
Use paraphrasing, but be careful
Paraphrasing is still one of the effective methods to make your content viewed as unique. Turnitin finds similar words and phrases but it obviously can’t find the paraphrased content. One drawback of this method is that it may take a lot of time to paraphrase. Try not to copy more than two words in a row. Otherwise, due to the peculiarities of the Turnitin algorithms, it will be viewed as a word sequence. Some experts insist that changing active into passive voice also helps. Don’t forget to alter the word order to make your text more unique. If you need to defeat the Turnitin algorithm in 2020, you can use the method of paraphrasing because it is still beneficial.
Use synonyms
The use of synonyms is still the main and most frequently used method to avoid plagiarized content. In this case, you substitute the words from the original text with corresponding synonyms or phrases with similar meaning. The main thing here is to preserve the original meaning.
Methods to trick turnitin that are reported not to work any longer
The use of layers in PDF documents
It was believed that Turnitin didn’t distinguish between different layers of a PDF file. Someone said that one layer was not visible for the program so it was safe to place plagiarized content there. Probably it was the case a few years ago but the program is being worked upon and since 2019 this method isn’t relative anymore.
The use of letters of a foreign alphabet
For some time, the use of foreign letters has been a method to bypass Turnitin algorithms. Now the program successfully detects different layouts. It simply won’t review such texts.
The use of graphical means
If you add graphs, maps or images it is believed to save your paper from detecting plagiarism. No matter how many images or graphs you use, the remaining space of your paper should be filled with unique content.
And just a few more thoughts on the subject. It’s better not to steal someone’s work even if it was not yet submitted anywhere. The risk of detecting plagiarism is rather high. Once a paper has been submitted to the internet it might appear in the database. You shouldn’t risk your reputation like that.
Take your time to study how to write. There are a lot of articles and videos over the internet that teach to write. After all, writing skills will be useful for you during your further work and study.