turnitin

[gdt]

These guys are starting to get on my nerves.

Their plagiarism page has a pie chart with this data. Elsewhere on the site they say this data comes from their corpus of plagiarised papers.

How students plagiarize

Entire paper copied	1.00%
Significant plagiarism	29.00%
No plagiarism	70.00%

Now what are the odds of the two data points ending on an exact percentage? One in 10,000. So there's a 9,999 in 10,000 chance that the figures are not exact to degree to which they are presented. That's either sloppiness or academic misconduct (claiming a quality of result not supported by the data).

There is also a category missing. Surely some 0.01% or more of the papers can't be categorised as plagiarised or not?

What are the odds of the convenient 70%/30% split between no/yes plagiarism? Remember this data is claimed to be from real life, not marketing.

A stunning hypocrisy from a site claiming to be opposed to academic misconduct.