Aside from the high school alluded to in this story, I've never seen Turnitin used in a high school context - one would think that HS papers generally aren't sophisticated enough to make it difficult to tell if there's been some plagiarizing.
In the university context, however, I've seen it used pretty heavily - and if you think that professors won't give out failing grades for people who refuse to submit their papers to it, you're (in my experience) dead wrong, seeing as the edict to make student use it generally comes down from the department heads.
We had a small controversy about this a few years ago at my old school. Some very smart students refused to submit their papers, and got Fs on them (for papers which all parties agreed were A- or better work). They eventually took it all the way through the university grievance process to the school Senate, where the decision was overturned and the new policy created: you can either submit your paper to Turnitin, or you can hand in all your notes and rough drafts with the work to be graded.
I vividly remember hating dealing with Turnitin way back when I was a freshman in high school, which was like 5-6 years ago. I'm not sure what the point was, since there was way more cheating going on during exams than there was plagiarism in English essays.
On a small sidenote, my last college English class involved a group project that also included some individual writing as well. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, one member decided to copy and paste her submission straight from Wikipedia. Pproving that everyone else had no part in her stupidity took an unhealthy amount of time, especially when the person in question kept insisting she didn't plagiarize anything. Sophisticated indeed.
Admittedly it was our fault for not realizing where the writing came from, but she was the straggler in the group that never participated in our email conversations and sent us her portion of the project the hour before it was due. I know there's always a slacker in a group project, but none of us imagined she would have done what she did...we just thought she was just procrastinating and so someone else quickly proofread for egregious grammar mistakes and then sent it off. Then in the individual work related to the group project (i.e. our thoughts, the work we did, etc.) she claimed just like we did that it was all her original writing.
So it ended up being a mess and the rest of us four being accused of academic dishonesty too because she wouldn't stop insisting that we were lying about her, until we came up with our separate and complete email conversations consisting of a couple hundred emails with research and drafts and my versioned work (thank goodness for svn?) which included what the others did with no trace of her writing and nothing but excuses and delays in her emails. I think I've learned from my mistakes (but too bad something like turnitin isn't available to students, heh).
+1 for using svn for schoolwork. No matter what schoolwork I did, if it was on a computer it was in a repo. Nothing beats a plagiarism accusation like being able to provide 40 revisions of your previous work spread over a few months.
In the university context, however, I've seen it used pretty heavily - and if you think that professors won't give out failing grades for people who refuse to submit their papers to it, you're (in my experience) dead wrong, seeing as the edict to make student use it generally comes down from the department heads.
We had a small controversy about this a few years ago at my old school. Some very smart students refused to submit their papers, and got Fs on them (for papers which all parties agreed were A- or better work). They eventually took it all the way through the university grievance process to the school Senate, where the decision was overturned and the new policy created: you can either submit your paper to Turnitin, or you can hand in all your notes and rough drafts with the work to be graded.