In this brief dialogue, Sam Parr explains that Turnitin.com grew into a multi‑billion‑dollar company offering an electronic essay‑submission service that checks for plagiarism, often flagging up to 98% similarity. Speaker B adds that before Turnitin, students would either pay others to write essays or copy existing online work, and that Turnitin’s detection capability effectively undermines those cheating methods.
They came up with turnitin.com, which ended up becoming like a huge company and sold for billions of dollars, I believe, where you would turn in your paper essay, but then you also had to submit an electronic copy, and it did a pretty good job of finding out if it was plagiarized. But like, it would alert teachers like, okay, like 98% of this is copied from somewhere.
And you have to write an essay in school. Some people would pay other people to do it for them. Some people would go find one online and try to plagiarize it. Well, this is going to basically screw that whole thing up.
