For online paper submissions, do you use Word's "editing time" feature?

[dudette10, MSN, RN]

i am a student, and i would like to one day become a nurse educator in a bsn program.

i was messing around with one of my papers--taking a look at statistics, properties, etc.--and i came across a feature in word that provides "total editing time."

i wondered how word calculated total editing time, so i googled. it is a "smart" calculator in that it only starts and stops the time count when the computer system is dedicating cpu usage to the document. this will enable the total editing time to reflect active work on the project and not include the time that the document is open but not being worked on.

googling further, i came across a forum in which a teacher asked, "if i am looking at a student paper that is 6 pages long, and "editing time" is 2 minutes, it looks like it was just copied over and the name changed with

no actual effort on the students part."

a technical expert didn't answer the teacher's question, but did state, "you will need more evidence than that to prove [color=#009900]plagiarism. if you save a document with a new filename the editing time is zeroed."

so, that got me to thinking...do any of you use that feature in word to help evaluate your students' documents? i also ask because now i'm a little bit concerned in how it might be used, if at all. one of my papers had an editing time of over 600 minutes, another had a time of nearly 500 minutes, and my third had a time of only 95 minutes.

well, that 95-minuter was extremely easy for me--so easy that i asked my classmates, "how long did you spend on this?" they were spending two or three times the amount of time on it than i was!

[skicheryl]

I grade about 30 APA papers each week and don't pay attention to the editing time in the documents. I use Turnitin to check for plagiarism.

[concernedMD]

Editing time means nothing if a student has copied his/her own file for backup purposes, for example. If the student sends the backup file, it will look like no editing time even if the student has spent many hours editing the original.