So, as per request of my English Composition professor, yesterday I submitted my research paper to Turnitin.com, a website that checks students papers for plagiarism. First of all, let me tell you that the research paper that I submitted for review was pretty much the first paper that I have ever written the way one is supposed to do it. I spent a few days in the library, read 15 articles (20-40 pages each) on the topic of gun control, placed in-text quotations every time I used information that I've found in my sources, and didn't even use "Russian internet" in order to get some "inspiration" for my work.

Imagine my surprise when the report told that 40% of my work is similar to that of other people, which, as I understand, implies that it was plagiarized by me. Surprised to get this kind of feedback, I decided to go over my paper where Turnitin highlighted all the parts that are supposedly similar to works of other people. I was totally freaked out when I saw why exactly loved by so many professors website blames me for copying (or whatever else their highlights mean) works of other people. 99% of what is considered by the website to be similar to other works is supposed to be similar in all papers.

First of all, they marked all the "works cited" part, which is plain stupid since the purpose of this page is to give credit to people whose works one uses for his or her paper. Secondly, they highlighted names of all the organizations in the work, such as National Rifle Association, Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, etc., which once again doesn't make any sense. Finally, throughout the paper, they keep marking in-text citations as 1-2% similarity to some other students' works, which is just beyond ridiculous. In addition, they found third of the sentences that were just my own thought on the subject "plagiarized", just because other students used the similar wording in some of their sentences.

I didn't pay much attention to all this crap yesterday because I thought that the teacher knows about all the flaws of this service. Today, however, she's sent me e-mail saying that I have to correct my work because it's incorrectly documented in 40% of the cases, as per opinion of the freaking Turnitin. I mean, are you f*ing kidding me? Wasn't she supposed to look through the paper and see how stupid 99% of the highlighting is? If she cared to spend at least 10 min per student's paper, she would have realized how stupid the whole Turnitin is!!!