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Don't let yesterday's contretemps about Turnitin's core product obscure that they have other terrible products, including Authorship Investigate, which compares different examples of a student's own writing to prevent "contract cheating." insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
So consider a student whose style is maturing, or who is taking a particular risk, or has started to imitate other prose styles (a common move in developing writers as they seek out their own voice). Authorship Investigate would flag those efforts as suspicious. Awesome!
I had a number of interesting back and forth on here yesterday vis a via Turnitin, and one thing I wish I'd articulated clearer that the purpose of a tool can't be to "catch cheaters." We must look at it through the frame of whether or not it helps students learn.
The use of Turnitin's detection software is not benign when it comes to students who aren't cheating. It clearly has detrimental effects on how they view writing, their sense of agency, and their relationship to a course and instructor.
Even if Turnitin worked well (it doesn't), it's doing harm to those who do not run afoul of its algorithm. Is catching the cheaters (and again, it isn't even good at that) worth the damage it's doing to everyone else?
Authorship Investigate is even worse in this light. It holds every student up to suspicion where you have to prove not just that you haven't cribbed sources, but that your writing is you. Consider what that signals to students about school, writing, growth, risk-taking, etc...
If I read a student's writing and it suddenly doesn't sound like them, I have a context for a discussion to see what's up. It could be growth, it could be some heavy-handed help, it could be experimenting. Rather than coming from a frame of suspicion, I can engage the student.
If I was a student in a class that used Authorship Investigate, and it flagged something I had done as suspicious, I would vow to burn that shit to the ground. I would distrust the teacher, the institution, the whole system. How could that risk be worth whatever could be gained?
If contract cheating is a problem - and I expect it is in some places - address the underlying conditions which create an atmosphere which makes contract cheating both possible and desirable (from the student perspective). An algorithmic arms race solves nothing.
My fellow @insidehighered blogger @bfister nails it in her post today. Turnitin is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism. We all lose if we accept this stuff. insidehighered.com/blogs/library-… 
I well-understand the labor circumstances which make the use of Turnitin attractive, too many students, too little time. But every use of Turnitin's tools makes those conditions a little bit worse, and moves us further away from the goal of helping students learn to write.
If the learning atmosphere is bad, all Turnitin does is inject a little bit of additional poison into the mix. Again, I sympathize, but it's not helping anyone.
