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Turnitin released a report covering over 1,000 institutions for a five year period that shows a substantial decrease in what it calls "unoriginal writing" at schools using Turnitin. While some of that reduction is certainly a result of using Turnitin, there are a number of flaws to their claims which we'll see in a follow-up post to this one.

In particular, see the sidebar on "Preventing plagiarism in research papers."

The cited article argues that forgetting "enhances flexibility, by reducing the influence of outdated information" and "promot(es) generalization" by preventing us from focusing on too many specific details. So how would your teaching change if you thought of forgetting as a "feature", not just a flaw? (The cited article is at http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)30365-3 if the link in the story doesn't work.)

If you're feeling the weight of the semester coming down on you, you're not alone.

The author details a number of critiques of Turnitin's recently released study purporting to show that Turnitin use results in a major decrease in plagiarism at institutions where it is used. The core of the critique is that Turnitin tends to start in classrooms where plagiarism has been a problem so the baseline is high and that it is often used in conjunction with a campus discussion about academic honesty and how to teach in ways that inhibit the drive to plagiarize.