How to Beat TURNITIN

Wad up cheats, liars and drunks, you read the title so lets do this!

As an increasing amount of universities around the world employ and use TURNITIN I decided to delve into the world of how to beat it.

While researching for this blog I consulted many of my tutors and fellow students at Uni and I found that similar methods kept coming up in conversation, firstly I would like to address these.

Replacing common English charters (e) with non-English (è) characters that look similar to confuse TURNITIN. This method is flawed as TURNITIN will recognise these and change them back to English and then check its database. Furthermore, it will then check the original copy with the non-English characters against its database. So it you use this, you're screwed.

Another method I heard was replacing spaces with white colored font characters to keep the word count down as well as masking copied material. TURNITIN checks for abnormal word lengths so if you use this you better believe you are screwed!

The other method I heard has the best possibility of working, only if the marker is honestly fucking stupid, is to place copied material in quotation marks.  In theory this works because it will recognise the material as a direct quote and therefore skip it. WRONG. TURNITIN will still check this. However, the person marking can turn this feature off but if there are large sections still in quotation marks they will be notified.

While researching this I found an interesting blog by a uni professor about this exact topic.  (http://blog.unemployedprofessors.com/how-to-beat-turnitin-com/). He goes onto say…

“Let me tell you a bit about what TURNITIN looks like from the inside, and why you can’t beat it. When I open TURNITIN, I see the names of all the students in my class. The filenames that they uploaded are next to their names, followed by an originality measure, and a bar that’s either green, yellow, or red. (DUDE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT TURNS RED? THAT’S SOME OMINIOUS STUFF). That’s TURNITIN matching the text that you submitted (forget about the macros – I’ve tried it myself – it does not work) with everything in its database.”

- Professor Rogue, 2012

Moreover he said that any copied text is shown to the marker when you are using TURNITIN because the program has the ability to breakdown a word document and idenitfy copied and pasted material. But even if you think, ‘oh if I delete a few words and replace them I can get around it.’ NOPE, you better believe TURNITIN will be onto your arse.

However, in saying all of this, I had to find a way around TURNITIN. So I fired up Tor and started surfing the deep web, browsing a lot of forums and found a few methods. Yes, they exist but they are so extravagant that it just makes me think that if you know how to reference properly writing your own material is honestly a lot easier.

so guys and gals, that’s how the Uni student warn you about getting caught by TURNITIN…

-Josh