Technology Rules

New York City schools use the coolest 24 technology to pick off plagiarists like Bauer busts terrorists:

A growing number of New York City schools are asking students to submit their papers through Turnitin.com, a service that compares students’ papers against everything on the Internet and a database of more than 15 million student papers.

In effort to curb plagiarism and emphasize the importance of original work, private schools like Xavier and Riverdale and top public schools like Stuyvesant and Midwood are among the 278 high schools statewide, including 52 in the city, that subscribe to the service.

Within a few minutes, papers are scanned against every known Internet source and every other paper that has ever been submitted to the site. The program highlights passages in the paper and identifies its original source, in addition to giving it an overall originality rating.

About a third of the papers submitted to the site are found to be more than 25% unoriginal, the CEO of iParadigms, John Barrie, said. His company owns Turnitin.