I vividly remember hating dealing with Turnitin way back when I was a freshman in high school, which was like 5-6 years ago. I'm not sure what the point was, since there was way more cheating going on during exams than there was plagiarism in English essays.
On a small sidenote, my last college English class involved a group project that also included some individual writing as well. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, one member decided to copy and paste her submission straight from Wikipedia. Pproving that everyone else had no part in her stupidity took an unhealthy amount of time, especially when the person in question kept insisting she didn't plagiarize anything. Sophisticated indeed.
Admittedly it was our fault for not realizing where the writing came from, but she was the straggler in the group that never participated in our email conversations and sent us her portion of the project the hour before it was due. I know there's always a slacker in a group project, but none of us imagined she would have done what she did...we just thought she was just procrastinating and so someone else quickly proofread for egregious grammar mistakes and then sent it off. Then in the individual work related to the group project (i.e. our thoughts, the work we did, etc.) she claimed just like we did that it was all her original writing.
So it ended up being a mess and the rest of us four being accused of academic dishonesty too because she wouldn't stop insisting that we were lying about her, until we came up with our separate and complete email conversations consisting of a couple hundred emails with research and drafts and my versioned work (thank goodness for svn?) which included what the others did with no trace of her writing and nothing but excuses and delays in her emails. I think I've learned from my mistakes (but too bad something like turnitin isn't available to students, heh).
+1 for using svn for schoolwork. No matter what schoolwork I did, if it was on a computer it was in a repo. Nothing beats a plagiarism accusation like being able to provide 40 revisions of your previous work spread over a few months.
On a small sidenote, my last college English class involved a group project that also included some individual writing as well. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, one member decided to copy and paste her submission straight from Wikipedia. Pproving that everyone else had no part in her stupidity took an unhealthy amount of time, especially when the person in question kept insisting she didn't plagiarize anything. Sophisticated indeed.