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[frogbert]

I received this in an email from a colleague earlier today:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/322998/how_to_cheat_turnitin_com/

Does anyone know about this? Is it a scam or an actual way of cheating Turnitin?

[glowdart]

I'm a little twitchy about clicking links after the last few days, but yes, I have students who have found all sorts of ways to cheat it, including using sites which has content hidden behind (frames? filters?) and changing a sufficient number of words around to beat the software. 

That is why, actually, I am looking at a paper that was uploaded and cleared turnitin and still is clearly badly paraphrased and not cited from a few websites which I am also looking at, and which I also uploaded to turnitin just in case the software missed the sites.  It didn't, but it also did hit on the paraphrasing. 

[frogbert]

Thanks for your response, glowdart. Good luck with your latest case!

As it turns out, the video contained in the link is two years old; I imagine that, if this 'cheat' really worked, many more of us would've noticed a lot of obvious plagiarism passing through the system. Unnecessary anxiety on my part, perhaps?

[glowdart]

Thanks for your response, glowdart. Good luck with your latest case!

As it turns out, the video contained in the link is two years old; I imagine that, if this 'cheat' really worked, many more of us would've noticed a lot of obvious plagiarism passing through the system. Unnecessary anxiety on my part, perhaps?

I'm not sure it's unnecessary - what they suggesting as the "cheat?"

[frogfactory]

I haven't watched the video, but from the comments it seems the suggestion is to replace every instance of the letter 'a' with a letter 'a' with a different ALT code.  That doesn't make much sense to me, but maybe there's a character in some script or other that looks very similar to 'a'.  I could watch the video and find out, but I prefer inference and speculation for the moment.

[tee_bee]

It's worth running the video. The advice is to 1) replace every occurence of, say, the letter a with a~ (a tillde), which is clever because a tilde is rarely used in English, esp. hanging by itself--the n with a tilde in Spanish is one character with its own ALT code. Then, the video shows how to write a short Word macro that, upon opening the file, searches and replaces all a~ with a, which then makes sense so tha~t the sentences don't rea~d funny a~s shown here.

Presumably, turn it in does not "read" the Word file the way we would on a screen, but just parses the underlying file in its "raw" form. All these tildes would throw it off. I doubt this would be too effective, unless turnitin has an absurdly simplistic algorithm for comparing files.

Even then, one can beat the little bast@rds by simply setting the security levels to the highest possible in Word, thereby requiring permission to run macros, or denying permission entirely. Then, the search and replace macro won't run, and you'll see this garbled file, which maybe an attempt to game the system. You could also look to see if there are any macros in the document--finding this macro would be the smoking gun.

Of course, this has probably been in the wild long enough that turnitin has figured out how to beat it. I hope so.

[glowdart]

It's worth running the video. The advice is to 1) replace every occurence of, say, the letter a with a~ (a tillde), which is clever because a tilde is rarely used in English, esp. hanging by itself--the n with a tilde in Spanish is one character with its own ALT code. Then, the video shows how to write a short Word macro that, upon opening the file, searches and replaces all a~ with a, which then makes sense so tha~t the sentences don't rea~d funny a~s shown here.

Presumably, turn it in does not "read" the Word file the way we would on a screen, but just parses the underlying file in its "raw" form. All these tildes would throw it off. I doubt this would be too effective, unless turnitin has an absurdly simplistic algorithm for comparing files.

Even then, one can beat the little bast@rds by simply setting the security levels to the highest possible in Word, thereby requiring permission to run macros, or denying permission entirely. Then, the search and replace macro won't run, and you'll see this garbled file, which maybe an attempt to game the system. You could also look to see if there are any macros in the document--finding this macro would be the smoking gun.

Of course, this has probably been in the wild long enough that turnitin has figured out how to beat it. I hope so.

I just took a one paragraph long piece of a website, searched and replaced all "a"s with an a~ and ran it through turnitin. 

Issues:
1. Turnitin shows you the raw file, so presumably the tildes would show up there even if hidden by a macro in the word file.  (I'm not bothering to write a macro today.  There are limits to my procrastination.)  I have seen enough wonkily formatted texts on turnitin that look just fine when viewed through Word to suspect what's happening there.  Plus, I have seen plenty of turnitin files with html coding embedded in text that doesn't show up in Word but does show up (and hit!) on turnitin. 

You just need to take the time to look at each raw file that is submitted and see if it looks funny (the originality report shows the raw file, so as long as you check each originality report, then you're fine.)

2.  While the turnitin file full of tildes did not hit on the source (250 words from a website), it did hit on papers submitted to five different schools, complete with the idiotic tildes showing up in the text.  It matched the tildes. 

Thus, proving once again, if you are cheating, so are hundreds of other people, and it is just a matter of time until someone else submits the same plagiarized material as you do.

3.  I then submitted the file sans tildes, and yes, it hit on hundreds (literally) of websites and students who have submitted that text. 



Frankly, the tildes make it so obvious that I would just fail a student outright for attempting to cheat, but then that's what I do anytime HTML code shows up in their papers, too.

[threefive]

I've discovered a terrific cheat!

Find some text online and from many off-line sources. Then, completely re-write all of this text from scratch with your own interpretation and structure, and be sure it is in a form that satisfies the requirements for the assignment. Cite the sources.

Turnitin will NEVER catch that! Suckers.

[circularity]

I'm guessing the macro is not embedded in the file. It's inserted, it runs once to turn all a's into a~'s once the student is done with the paper, and then it's deleted. Heck, that can be done with a simple find-replace.

Funny way to try to game the system, though.

Here's another idea: Turn your paper into an image file and make that into a pdf. I'm guessing that turnitin doesn't use OCR.

[williamvin]

Hey, Can anyone please tell me how to go for the step for these cheating.
I had try, but im not sure its working or not. I'm still waiting for the % of similarity from turnitin.

i had done the replacement from 'a' to 'a~'> Macros to create the AutoOpen> types all the words until End Sub> save the AutoOpen and the doc. text that are messy with 'a~'

after that, which paper do i need to submit to turnitin. i'm not sure is the messy that one or actual proper one. cause i had try to submit the messy one, but the turnitin was appeared with 'a~'

I'm just confuse with the step. Could anyone please help. Its better if you tell me all the steps from the beginning to end. Thanks

Regards,
Will

[quietly]

Hey, Can anyone please tell me how to go for the step for these cheating.
I had try, but im not sure its working or not. I'm still waiting for the % of similarity from turnitin.

i had done the replacement from 'a' to 'a~'> Macros to create the AutoOpen> types all the words until End Sub> save the AutoOpen and the doc. text that are messy with 'a~'

after that, which paper do i need to submit to turnitin. i'm not sure is the messy that one or actual proper one. cause i had try to submit the messy one, but the turnitin was appeared with 'a~'

I'm just confuse with the step. Could anyone please help. Its better if you tell me all the steps from the beginning to end. Thanks

Regards,
Will

Dear lord.

The time-stamp is the best part.

[williamvin]

Hey,

Does anyone know about cheating in turnitin? Please reply me ASAP. Its very urgent now.

I'm just confusing with the steps.

I have done eveything, just want to confirm only. Also i have submitted the original document to turnitin, is that right? or i have to submit the second document that with 'a~' messy one?

Please let me know, im very urgent to know it right now.

Thanks



Will

[voxprincipalis]

Hey,

Does anyone know about cheating in turnitin? Please reply me ASAP. Its very urgent now.

I'm just confusing with the steps.

I have done eveything, just want to confirm only. Also i have submitted the original document to turnitin, is that right? or i have to submit the second document that with 'a~' messy one?

Please let me know, im very urgent to know it right now.

Thanks



Will

I hope you are a sock.

Are you seriously asking a bunch of professors for help in cheating by trying to outwit Turnitin?

However, it is clear why you need help. Your writing is atrocious. (That means "bad.")

VP

[quietly]

Hey,

Does anyone know about cheating in turnitin? Please reply me ASAP. Its very urgent now.

I'm just confusing with the steps.

I have done eveything, just want to confirm only. Also i have submitted the original document to turnitin, is that right? or i have to submit the second document that with 'a~' messy one?

Please let me know, im very urgent to know it right now.

Thanks



Will

I hope you are a sock.

Are you seriously asking a bunch of professors for help in cheating by trying to outwit Turnitin?

However, it is clear why you need help. Your writing is atrocious. (That means "bad.")

VP

See, I thought sockpuppet too, but resurrecting a weeks-old thread smacks of someone who just did a Google search for "cheat turn-it-in," for which this thread is the third hit.

And who would get up at 5 a.m. for that? Sure, that's east coast US, but west coast and the scenario is even more loopy.  Unless turn-it-in is big in the UK, this looks like the real thing.

[magistra]

After all, if he were willing to read, he'd be less likely to need to cheat.

Cheating Fail!