Can It Spot an Essay on Hubris?

With the start of the quarter, as I log in to use turnitin.com, the proprietary plagiarism-detection algorithm that my university is licensed to use, I am struck by the many ironies in John M. Barrie's triumphal biographical narrative called "How Original" on the company's site, which explains how he came to dominate the market for identifying the cheating students who cut-and-paste together essays from the Internet. According to Barrie, the solution for the disengaged and impersonal instruction being offered to undergraduates is automating authentification by looking for word strings in undergraduate prose with no sense of meaning or the context of authorship.