The Integrity of Turnitin

Like all the students in our World Cultures, we had to submit our term papers to Turnitin as well as hand in a hard copy. When I submitted my term paper to Turnitin, I found something very interesting. Just like many other websites, its homepage was essentially a giant ad for itself. Is it surprising? Just a little. Should it be surprising? In this day, I guess it should not be that surprising.

The homepage had lots of phrases trying to make this online program sound like it is the next best thing for students and teachers. It was making it sound like this was key to helping improve a student's writing. It had phrases like, "Your Partner in Education with Integrity," or "Improve Student Writing with Instant Feedback as They Revise." Another statement, " Deliver Feedback that Engages Students and Drives Success." I guess all these phrases provides some information about what this program does. From those three phrases we would assume that this program is supposed to help students improve their writing as they revise their work. From the statistics they throw at us such as "77% of students say Feedback Studio has helped them become better writers." Now all of that tells us about other products this company produces, that's great, but what if I'm looking into Turnitin? What does any of this do to sell me on what Turnitin does? It does not. It also does not tell us what their other products do that makes these programs so different that it is better than how students revise and get feedback now. None of that is stated. These ideas are all presented in the video we were watching in class about marketing. This does nothing for the company except leave us with more questions than answers.

Now assuming we already use Turnitin from paper submissions, let's look at how they advertise that program's importance in writing. Once you login to your account it has two tabs one title, "What is Plagiarism," and, "Citation Help." The company is trying to show program's relevance by showing the program's features by showing us how we can accidental plagiarize something, and this program catches those mistakes, and it shows us how to cite sources. It is by doing this that the company is trying to show why we need to use this program. It is trying to show us why the current way we check for plagiarism needs to change, and this program is the way it will change.

They are not wrong in what they do. They could be a little clearer, and the might be to their benefit, but maybe, just like in The Persuaders, maybe there is some code that they are following to appeal to a different group of people than myself. The tabs about citing and plagiarism on the flip side are very effective at demonstrating the effectiveness of this program, and I can agree with the use of this program. This goes to show you that nothing is free of advertising.

Turnitn's homepage:
/http://turnitin.com/

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 2, 2017 at 5:23 PM

    i agree with your point that advertising is everywhere. i think that having less ads would really end up helping us and we wouldn't end up being convinced that we need certain products. i also agree with the point that these ads do not completely allow for us to buy into the product. however, i think that subconsciously, since we see these ads all the time, when we are in a store we end up thinking that this product is good without truly realizing why. while an ad may not cause for us to buy the product right away, it could influence our decision in the future without us actually realizing it

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