Over the last few weeks, a number of Canadian universities have experienced problems with Turnitin, the digital paper-submission system which detects plagiarism by comparing students’ work to that of their peers.
The University of Toronto and Ryerson University both posted university-wide notices regarding the outage, which began on March 9. It appears that students were able to submit their work, but instructors were unable to retrieve results.
“Users trying to access Turnitin.com at this time are not able to access originality reports,” read a public notice on the University of Toronto teacher’s website. “Access has been restored for a few courses but the problem persists.”
Instructors at McGill were also affected by the disruption. Professor Alberto Sanchez-Allred of the anthropology department experienced minor problems last week.
“[I]n the end it wasn’t such a big deal for me,” he said in an email. “I couldn’t access the assignments that students turned in or the reports for a few days, but now everything seems to be back to normal.”
According to iParadigms, the creator of Turnitin, less than one percent of the affected accounts experienced downtime longer than two days, and as of March 22, only 0.4 percent of affected accounts were still without service.
Turnitin operates at 9,500 educational institutions in 126 countries. According to Chris Harrick, vice-president of marketing for iParadigms, the problem has had little impact outside of Canada.
“This outage was confined to the storage nodes that hold data for our Canadian customers,” he said in an email to the Tribune. “It did have a very brief impact on our worldwide user base, but the majority of the impact was only on Canadian customers.”
But to Ryerson’s students, their two-week server disruption felt like an eternity.
In its defence, last year Turnitin was online roughly 99.9 per cent of the time. Nevertheless, Harrick remained apologetic.
“We know how much our instructors and students rely on the service and we’re very sorry about the inconvenience this outage has caused to our customers,” Harrick said. “We take these sorts of disruptions very seriously and are constantly working to improve the reliability of our service.”
