Melania Trump's convention speech may well turn into a teachable moment at college campuses this fall as a real-life lesson in the dangers of plagiarism.
It's been estimated that 25 percent of students try to pass off other people's words as their own, according to Turnitin, a popular online service used to detect plagiarized passages in written works.
If Monday night's speech had been a college essay, it "would have been flagged," says Jason Chu, Turnitin's education director. And more likely than not, it would have prompted a heart-to-heart with her professor, if not an F in class, experts say.
By now, a staffer has taken responsibility for the fact that the speech, delivered by Donald Trump's wife, lifted sentences and phrases verbatim from a similar one by Michelle Obama in 2008.
As the flap was unfolding, Turnitin posted a blog touting its service, and at least one English professor, at Dillard University, tweeted her plans to use the speech in her syllabus this fall — to teach students about plagiarism.
On college campuses, cribbing other people's words is something of a cardinal sin that, in extreme cases, can get students kicked out of school.
But even those who say they have "zero tolerance" for plagiarism admit that, in practice, it's not always intentional.
"I think a lot of plagiarism is inadvertent," says Jane Kirtley, a professor of law and media ethics at the University of Minnesota. "The reality is that people get exposed to literature, speeches, all kinds of things, and absorb it and think they created it. And that does happen."
She noted that it's easier than ever for students to copy and paste information from the internet and mingle it with their own notes. But the internet also has made it easier than ever to detect, which should — but doesn't always — act as a deterrent.
"I'm sorry to say that I think students are still living in a state of denial about how likely it is that their professors will catch it," she said. "Particularly students who are either stressed or doing marginally in a class. The sheer ease of it probably means that it happens more frequently."
Services like Turnitin are used to scan college papers and other texts for what it calls "unoriginal content."
It can flag phrases or large chunks of texts that overlap other written works; and what it calls "fuzzy matches," when a few words are selectively changed. If they "change every third word, we can pick that up," said Chu.
Just hours after questions were raised about Melania Trump's convention speech, Turnitin ran a comparison to Michelle Obama's 2008 speech and found a 6 percent match, according to Chu. While that may not sound like much, he said, "we found at least one instance of a 23-word match between those speeches. The likelihood of that being coincidence is very, very small." He put the odds at less than one in a trillion.
But it's up to humans to decide if it's plagiarism, he noted. "You can never use technology to measure intent."
maura.lerner@startribune.com
