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Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse?
Foo Shackelford asks: "At my University I have noticed a disturbing trend and was wondering if there are any other students, faculty, or staff who have concerns about the web based anti-plagiarism service called Turnitin.com? Turtnitin.com is supposed to be is a placebo for plagiarism where students submit papers for analysis. While plagiarism is by all accounts bad and should not be tolerated, the implementation of Turnitin.com on University campuses leaves many questions unanswered. If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter. Where are the rights of the student? Also, there appears to be no warrantee to the accuracy of the service. Where does this leave the student who is accused of plagiarism? It would be nice for those who decide to implement the usage of services like these within their institutions to look beyond the placebo and consider issues of privacy, intellectual property, and most of all trust relationship that they hold with their students. Any thoughts on this?" We last touched on a related issue in this
article on students GPLing their work. Might such a solution work here in terms of protecting a student's right to use any work that they submit to other sites/services that have implicit contracts like the one described here for Turnitin.Com?
I'm turning in a paper that was blatantly plagiarised so I can get my sugar pill!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What exactly is this talking about?
Plagiarized work becomes their property.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I can tell you that if turnitin.com is anything like slashdot, they'll just mod the paper into oblivion if it doesn't jive with the editors' opinions. But hey, what do I know?
there's that same big block of legaese at the beginning that will trigger the filter every time :-)
I see how the issues of ownership are troubling, but I don't see why in the post Turnitin is called a "placebo." It actually catches cheaters (my gf is a TA, so I've seen it in action), and because of this acts as a powerful deterrent. If the copyright/ownership/confidentiality issues are resolved, I for one think this kind of service is pretty great.
Cheating will always happen.
It's sort of like drugs, or for that matter software/music/movie piracy. There's no way to completely stop it, short of a police state. Turnitin.com seems to me to be a good example of that 1984-esque state. I'd prefer freedom with a side of poor ethics, thank you very much.
That, and college is about what you learn. Or at least I'd like to think it is. In fact, dare I say that's what I think life is all about. Maybe I'm just crazy. But despite the fact that it sounds like an after school special, it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.
So yes, plagiarism is bad, cheating is bad, and we should take steps to prevent it. But we should be realistic, realize that we'll never stop it completely unless we're willing to give up freedoms that I at least like having around, and let the cheaters screw themselves over in the long run.
if you have a problem with the TOS then DONT GIVE THEM YOUR PAPER
No sig for you!!
Plagarism? That's preposturous! That paper was licensed under the GPL! I had every right to copy it and modify a few words here and there, as long as I made the paper available to others...
1) Does the tutor/lecture own the document.
If Yes:
Then he has the right to transer ownership to this site. And the student has already given up all rights.
If No:
Then he does not have , and any contract between him and site are void. If I submit "War And Peace" is does not mean the site now owns it, as I don't have any rights to the document.
Cruise TT
The level of what trust ? Trust that the students can be sure their papers will be run through turnitin.com ? Trust that their teachers don't trust them to turn honest papers in ?
This turnitin.com thing sounds all about cashing in on distrust to me, frankly.
Imagine if your parent ran the company. Free papers for life!!!
It would help if someone can find the line/paragraph in question and post it. I can't. Anyway, I will never GPL my paper to protect it.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I wonder if they mean panacea.
A panacea is a 'cure-all'. A placebo is a fake cure for something. Sure, this guy probably thinks the service is fake, but I believe he was trying to say that this service considers ittself a cure-all for plagiarism.
Placebo is the opening of a part of the Latin vesper
service for the dead, and it also means "something done to placate or please someone." But its use in medicine--"a harmless, unmedicated dose
or pill given a patient who insists on a treatment that the physician believes
is not needed"--is its most frequently used sense, occasionally confused with panacea. In medical experiments, a placebo is the nondrug given the control group in order that the effectiveness of the drug being given the other patients can be assessed more accurately.
SOURCE: http://www.bartleby.com/68/92/4392.html
(lest I be accused of plagiarism myself)
The Cost: Its expensive, I don't know how much it costs but its money. This means that money is being spent to catch the dishonest instead of helping the honest. Arguably there is benefit to the honest when the dishonest are caught but the level of benefit pales in comparison to what could be achieved if the money was directly spent on the honest students.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence. I realize its not the court of law but it just seems wrong to me.
The faculty on campus here is evaluating is service. One of the reasons they keep copies is to check future submissions against this copy. This keeps students from selling their papers to the next class for use with a different Prof.
Now why they have to own the paper is beyond me...but IANAL
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Heh, I'm surprised that we don't sign an agreement with slashdot to the effect of "Every post you make will become GPL'ed and shared with everyone" ;-)
... because I can't find anything in the usage agreement about students giving up the rights to their papers. OK, IANAL, but if it's in there, can somebody please point it out to me?
Something to keep students from thinking.
[rant]I'm sorry, but as a student, this kind of stuff drives me nuts. I work for every grade I get. I stay up nights working instead of drinking. And then to find out that someone else cannot earn their grade. As I see it, this is just a company making money off of people, and if it becomes profitable, they will sell the work they've done for you to your teacher. As a student, it's not worth it.[/rant]
On a final note, is this what Microsoft is so worried about with GPL?
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I think you meant perhaps "panacea"?
Definitions:
placebo
panacea
-josh
If this is being implemented at state universities, that's one thing, but otherwise I would say that if you don't like it, get your education elsewhere. Cheating devalues everybody's degree, and if you aren't cheating, then why should you care? It's not even invasive, so what gives?
The real question is how to get more institutions to adopt such a system.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
I'm a university lecturer, and I use Plagiserve. Invaluable for detection of plagiarism from published Internet sources (v relevant for my course). But it doesn't catch students copying from each other - the only way to do that is to collect students scripts, as Turnitin are doing.
Give me a break... you're going WAY too far. Once you submit a paper to a university, it's THEIR paper. You have rights to it, but so do they. If you don't want your paper to be stored in turnitin then don't submit it there. If the professor wishes to, then more power to him/her!
Over half the students i graduated with cheated their way through university. I saw it constantly. Someone copied my stuff once and tried to turn it in. I had them up in front of a review board as soon as it was on the professor's desk. Cheating is RAMPANT. I say if this helps then go to it.
I'm a really huge fan of the sites that check code files for plagarism as well. The break the code down to algorithm checking rather than a text diff.
If you don't like it... then don't plagarize. Once your professor sees that nobody is plagarizing, he/she has no reason to use the service anymore. FYI, it's not fun for them to do, you know. It's extra work, and nobody likes extra work.
By reading this message, you forfeit all rights to every piece of property you own, will own, or think about owning. By continuing to read this message, you forfeit your first and third born childe
Just because they say it, doesn't make it so. The University has no rights to give away a student's intellectual property, therefore, that clause cannot legally be enforced against a student's work. If you don't agree, please, send me your stuff.
"That's right, it's closed source and encrypted, but you can ask me questions about it, which I may or may not answer."
"Umm.."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...that if my university or my teacher were to imtose the use of this service, I would stand up and say "No". I would also go to the Univeristy Newspaper office and I'm sure, from past articles, that it would make first page the following morning.
I think most teachers would be equally disturbed by the conditions of use of the site. Simply, nobody reads them.
You mean it doesn't actually check anything, it just makes you think it has?
--- I hate my sig
Where, exactly, in the User Agreement does it say that the company gets the papers? - Emcron
I told my teacher this and she seemed unconcerned. So I am planning to meet with the higher ups to show them the problem with the system.
By the way, my school's website can be found here Saint Xavier High School. . I can't wait until graduation comes and I can get out of that place. Anyone who says single gender education is a good thing should be smacked silly.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
Don't that beat all?
Why is file sharing considered stealing, but a corporation, namely turnitin.com, assuming possession of your work isn't?
Who's willing to put down some money that TurnItIn.com is the front end to a research paper selling service?
"Give us your work. We'll use it to make sure no is using it (without paying us first)"
Maybe not, but I'd get a kick and a chuckle out of it...
Th
...misspell your BigWords. Pretty darn tough to get caught if, for instance, you use "placebo" when you really mean "panacea."
I know, there's a risk the professor might actually read your paper and discover that you're illiterate, but it's a pretty slim risk...
...'cause most professors just toss the papers down a staircase, and grade 'em based on distance.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Somebody is losing out on compensation here. Someone call the RIAA, MPAA or something like that...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
As I type this I'm about 10% of the way through marking over 100 papers, and I'm feeling pretty sick after reading the same words again and again. Cheating isn't right, and it devalues the degree that some students work hard to achieve. If it was up to me I'd fail the lot of them, and any way of automating cheat detection would be fantastic. The non-native English speaking students are the easiest to catch when they use identically odd sentences, but its impossible to manually check this many papers against each other.
As far as I know, work that is done within the university by undergraduates, using the equipment and facilities provided by the uni for this reason, is owned by the University itself, not the undergraduate student.
I think you could do what RMS does on all his documents and write:
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
If all plagiarized material belongs (Turnitin.com) to them are, does that make they legally responsible (liable) for it? Can the person who was plagiarized sue them?
It's obvious that any paper you write is your artistic property. Should Turnitin claim otherwise, just mention the DMCA and sue them out of existence.
NPR is running a bit on this site right now, as it has apparently "divided" a small Kansas town.
http://news.npr.org/
The teacher gave the students F's because they had plagiarized and then the school board turned around and forced the teacher to give them passing grades.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Where does it say that? After careful reading of the agreement I can't find any reference to Turnitin owning the submitted papers. That idea doesn't make sense anyway, because the students don't subscribe to the service or submit their papers; the instructors do. There's no way a student loses any rights to a paper just because an instructor uploads it somewhere.
Maybe the confusion comes from the phrase, "our exclusive database of submitted papers." That doesn't imply that Turnitin has exclusive rights to the papers, only that nobody else can search their database.
You can take plagerized texts, run it through this software and then keep tweeking it until it no longer sets off the filter alarm.
chiefly for two reasons:
1. As mentioned in the story, turnitin.com acquires copyright of the content. I've read the license and nowhere do they guarantee that they shall not misuse content that's been uploaded. (Although they do prohibit any other person from using others' content... that'd be interesting actually, they'd be party to the plagiarizing!)
2. Part of the license also says that the content can be used by the US Government, particularly by a defense related agency. That only means, that the CIA could come snooping in on innocuous content and the next thing you know, they'd start suspecting us of treason and subterfuge.
Surely, any university worth its name in salt can come up with some kind of a plagiarism-detecting software system. Or better still... maybe someone could come up with an Open Source version of turnitin.com's software. What say guys?
How are they ever supposed to build a database of papers if they don't keep a copy of ones that are submitted? It seems like if one wants to prevent plagiarism, one needs to have something to check it against? And why would you ever need to check it for plagiarism if you're the one who wrote it... seems like you want to find out if it's within the limits or not... I think it's a great tool for profs/TA's who are suspicious and want to start a process... I recommended the site to my mom (University prof) a while back.
"Once you submit a paper to a university, it's THEIR paper."
This was true in my time and I know that at most schools it still is. This doesn't stop with papers but all code for classes or for fun if the schools resources were used. I had a friend who sold some code to a company that wanted to use it in one of their products and as soon as the school found out they demanded all money. Same for a code snipit that was going to be published in a book. The school found out and demanded that the school be in the credits not the student.
Schools have you over a barrel when it comes to work done while you are going there.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
I wish folks would quit saying 'disturbing trend' on slashdot so much. I've noticed it in so many articles and posts. There are plenty of other phrases you can use that do not make you sound like someone who's watched too many X-Files re-runs.
bad trend
silly trend
upsetting trend
horrible trend
unsettling trend
CmdrTaco trend
Victor
but i don't plagiaise, i'm not in school, and i've other things to do than race towards a placebo for plagiarists, or even panacea for plagiarists.
-f
www.blackant.net
If no-one lent people their paper to copy, there'd be no plagiarism.
As every good homicide cop knows, "Everyone lies."
Damn, you're almost good enough to be a slashdot editor!
Since you are on campus, you should have access to alot of computers, and just launch a DDoS attack against 'em.
Where are the rights of the student?
Students don't seem to have rights any more. They are more or less a commodity used to pad out a spreadsheet.
--saint
First the legalese... I am not a lawyer.
Okay...
Anything I write is automatically copyrighted by ME. That's the law.
If I use this service to submit my own papers, that constitutes an implied consent to license my paper to their service.
However, when a teacher submits student papers to this service... Those papers automatically become property of the service... and therefore, that's an illegal transfer of the copyright...
In other words, Turnitin is the napsterization of student papers.
On top of THAT, the service requires that the students name be passed on with the paper when submitted (with the noble reason being that they want to notify the student when somebody cheats from her paper... but in the fine print it says that such information can be used for marketing purposes.)
And last but not least, the web crawler portion of this service is also illegal, because it will inevitably hit a database cache of other papers used for reference and capture them. Copying another's database is a violation of the DMCA.
This has, of course, been a topic of debate here on Slashdot and in academia for a long time.
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
Teachers are not paid nearly enough for what they are worth, so do I blame them for using a service like this? Not really. There are potential disasters, where something is tagged as plagiarism when it is not, but that is a process issue that could be overcome with the teaching administration.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Coincidentally enough, I heard this story (RealAudio format) on Morning Edition on the drive to work. In summary: a Kansas teacher flunked many students in her sophomore biology class when turnitin.com flagged a bunch of her papers. The school board in this small Kansas community came out of a closed session and reversed the teacher's decision.
The upshot: the teacher resigned in protest, the district attorney is suing the school board for violating state open meeting laws, and the small community/small school is "divided" now that the school's gained a reputation for being full of cheaters.
I wonder if some of the poster's concerns were aired with the school board's attorney in the closed session.
First the legalese... I am not a lawyer.
Okay...
Anything I write is automatically copyrighted by ME. That's the law.
If I use this service to submit my own papers, that constitutes an implied consent to license my paper to their service.
However, when a teacher submits student papers to this service... Those papers automatically become property of the service... and therefore, that's an illegal transfer of the copyright...
In other words, Turnitin is the napsterization of student papers.
On top of THAT, the service requires that the students name be passed on with the paper when submitted (with the noble reason being that they want to notify the student when somebody cheats from her paper... but in the fine print it says that such information can be used for marketing purposes.)
And last but not least, the web crawler portion of this service is also illegal, because it will inevitably hit a database cache of other papers used for reference and capture them. Copying another's database is a violation of the DMCA.
--
We DEMAND a better mod system!!
If a service accuses you of plagiarism, it is up to an actual human being to then compare the student's work to the suspected document to be sure. To simply accuse someone without supporting evidence is asking for trouble.
There could very likely be false positives. There would probably have to be to some extent. It can't look for perfect matches, as simply changing the name would be enough to thwart that detection. And if it matches too closely, any common phrase of more than seven or eight words, while somewhat unlikely, is certainly not beyond the realm of reason. Any legitimate quoting could set this off easily.
It would also be difficult to detect the student who did a little bit of work and paraphrased the paper. While all the topics, references, and issues would be the same, the entire paper would be written with different words, and a simple grep would be practically useless. And you can't exactly do matches on topic, since likely that much WOULD be in common between the two papers.
Likely the service is in place to detect the obvious cheaters. And since it and other similar systems seem to be finding quite a few, its probably not unjustified. Even more so when hoardes of the accused don't come up screaming about it later.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Suppose you turn in (original) work which just barely deserves an A. Then suppose that your classmates turn in plagarized work which would deserve a strong A if they were not plagarized.
You then have the case either where everybody gets an A (and your grade is diluted, because your class/school gets a reputation for grade inflation), or you get a B because the other pieces of work are better than yours.
I have been in classes where I suspected other people of cheating, and I did not like it one bit when they got a better grade for it.
I must speak up in favor of this service.
Colleges and Universities, as most of you know, have very little tolerance for plagiarism - and rightfully so. High schools, however, have widely varying standards; some schools (often large public school) have near total tolerance of plagiarism, while other schools deal with it as a minor matter. This is not universal; I have spoken to administrators from schools which have a zero-tolerance, or "one bust" rule for plagiarism. The problem comes when students from 'tolerant' schools go to college, and simply don't have a good education in academic honesty.
This service could well help large high school enforce tough anti-plagiarism policies which will not only stop cheaters (a less-important goal) but more importantly, will make sure their students are ready for the next level of academia, when they will be held to a higher standard.
The concerns with privacy and content ownership at this sight are troubling, but they can be dealt with; the most important things is to use the anti-plagiarism resources of the internet as a way to fight the great potential for 'commonplace' (i.e., general papers and reports) plagiarism that clearly exists.
Ok, so my only question is what right does the teacher have to submit your work to a website, if i remember my student handbook correctly a student retains owner ship of the work he or she has done.
The ownership of student academic work, or of academic work in general, usually varies by discilpine. For example, in Philosophy MOST academics will allow others to reprint their works gratis - it's often considered "bad form" not to, because everyone expects reciprocity in this regard. In other disciplines, such a system would be treated as absurd. In some sciences, people who help with papers are given co-authorship for minimal involvement. In other disciplines a "thanks for the help" is considered sufficient.
For the most part, academic works act as though they are open source. Certianly people are given credit for their ideas (through notation and citation), and they must be referenced in a bibliography or works cited if their ideas are used, but anything published is considered fair game for adaption, criticism, and use as support for someone else's ideas. Without such permissions, academic development could not occur because students would not be permitted to make use of the ideas they learned.
I think these freedoms come from the way academic work values the work itself, rather than money. If I write open source software that is virtually the same as another program, with no valuable modifications, then the community would not give a damn. The same is true of academic work - I could rewrite Plato's Republic and nobody would see it as valuable. But, if I rewrote it with interesting new insights and modifications, that is valued. In software development, the focus is (usually) on profit and commercialism rather than on superior products. Listen to the economists - better software comes from competition that stems from the desire to accumulate money. In academic disciplines, wealth is defined by contributions to the community, to the discipline. Much like open source software.
Also this morning's Morning Edition
Essentially, a biology teacher in Kansas used the free trial of this site to check the final projects of her 110 HS sophmore students. She found 28 had cheated on the project, and thus gave them zero's, which meant they all failed her class. One of the parents of the cheaters raised cain with the school board, which instructed the teacher to reverse her grading decision. The teacher resigned rather than make the change.
What does this all mean? Fear not. Stupid school boards will alway defend the rights of cheaters!
If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter. Where are the rights of the student?
Er.. maybe the right to NOT use the service?
I'll be the first to agree with privacy-based objections to a service like turnitin... but something fairly drastic appears to be necessary. Should they be keeping copies of previous papers? Perhaps not, but it's certainly going to make the scanning more effective.
I teach math and science in a high school, and assigned an optional paper for extra credit in my AP Chemistry class. Upon reading the papers, several of them seemed considerably more sophisticated than I had expected... so I ran through a series of very trivial little searches on google. Lo and behold, 7 of the 10 papers had been lifted verbatim from webpages. Only one or two of the students had even gone to the trouble of changing any text at all.
A google search on suspicious phrases is hardly a very effective algorithm, and I'm not altogether confident that the last three papers were original work.
As a math/science teacher, I don't assign too much writing, so this problem isn't really a huge concern to me - but as a history teacher? 70% is huge! I'd use turnitin without a qualm.
They seem pretty straightforward about their intentions, and they're worthwhile ones. It doesn't seem to me that turnitin was formed with the intention of gaining a batch of copyrighted IP, nor do I expect they'll abuse that ownership.
Where are the rights of the student?
Simple. Students have a right to not submit their work to turnitin.com. They cannot claim ownership of papers that have not been submitted to them.
If a student's instructor submits the paper to turnitin.com, I do not see how they can claim ownership. Simply put, my instructor can't give up my property rights. Only I can do that. This follows along the same lines as my friends not being able to give away my car.
I don't really see a problem here. If you don't like their TOS, don't use them. The Free Market economy will take care of the rest.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
From what I have read on their site, the service is directed more towards reports. The site itself is not laid out in a helpful manner, so I can't be sure. So, if Turnitin services do not include code, I can't see how the GPL would apply. If I write a report for class, the contents of that report, its writing style, and the conclusions made remain my intellectual property. This is clearly outlined in our school's student constitution. (I understand that each school has a different policy, so your rights may differ). However, should a third party license agreed to by the school seek to change the ownership of said report, consent of the student must be sought. Therefore, if the teacher who has subscribed to such a service has not solicited your consent, any contract the teacher engages in prior to that consent is null and void.
However, this again only applies to schools who clearly outline the property rights of the student. There are institutions (especially private and / or unaccredited education institutions) that clearly state that work produced while a part of the student body becomes the intellectual property of the school or institution. Though the morality of this is questionable, no major court cases have overturned the right of the educational institutional to make such a claim. This become a gray area if the work produced was created using resources provided by the educational institution. While this applies less to literary works and program code, this does apply to students of chemistry, electronics and robotics. Say for instance a student created a new polymer using supplies provided by the university. Said polymer would be the legal property of the university. It is true that the student will often get credit for the initial discovery, but any subsequent sale of the polymer would be between the buyer and the school with the profits being pocketed by the institution.
I would suggest that any student who has questions regarding their ownership rights should speak with the human relations department of their school. Most schools are not trying to find way to violate the property rights of the student, but are instead trying to decrease their own liability. If you feel that your rights have been violated, contact an attorney - most attorneys are willing to do a free consultation (at least for the first hour). Just be honest with whoever you do speak with, and quite often they will return the favor. If you do not trust the professor in a class, or you want to guarantee the ownership of your intellectual property, simply place a copyright notice at the beginning to the document and mail yourself a copy of the document before turning it in. There are legal cases that uphold the "poor-inventor" form of copyright protection.
17% match with CP/M
23% match with BSD
32% match with Apple OS
34% match with DEC VMS
16% match with Borland
Summary:
112% matches with other source bases (indicates
mutual plagarism)
0% original code
they can't claim ownership if you do first.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
Pricing link: http://www.turnitin.com/pricing.html
I can't find anywhere on the site this company says they own the works sent to them. Here are the terms of use All I can find is the usual "contents of this site are copyrighted", but that's the site, not the papers submitted.
Kilroy was here!
I am surprised at how many schools already use turnitin.com: "over 15000 registered users". That's teachers, not students.
And not just high-schools and junior colleges- the list on their site includes:
The University of California System
Georgetown University
Cornell University
Duke University
The California Institute of Technology
Colgate University
Rice University
Boston University
Villanova University
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rutgers University
US Military Academy, West Point
Tulane University
Trinity College
Swarthmore College
Wesleyan University
The Citadel
The University of Western Ontario
The University of Leeds, UK
Manakau Institute of Technology, New Zealand
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
That site name is misleading.
I thought it was for students to turn in their handguns for extra credit...
0% of original code
How can you code so many security holes in 0 lines of code?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.
This is the common wisdom, and while it's true that someone who cheats their way through college may ultilmately be hurting themselves, there could be a negative impact on the college as well. Colleges and universities care a lot about their reputation and credibility, and if they pump out enough people who look much better on paper than they really are, it will ultimately have a negative impact on their reputations.
I'm not justifying this particular service, it does seem too extreme, but rather just saying that colleges do have a stake in not turning out too many graduates who have cheated their way through to a large degree.
Disclaimer: During my career I've been a university professor and a corporate training in many occasions; my views are tempered by these experiences.
I don't advocate the use of turnitin.com or any other service in catching students "cheating" on their papers. When I was both a student I was taught that acquiring analytical and synthesis skills are the purposes of a university education. Based on that principle, my best teachers were the ones who based their grades on analysis, synthesis, or some measurable activity (hands-on project, test) rather than "a paper". I tried carrying forward with this tradition during my career.
I believe that a service like turnitin.com is an insult to both students and teachers. The students will always find a way to break the rules. The teachers will become lazy and complacent. The service is extremely easy to be defeated if you just use some common sense and some non-academic skills. Besides, grading a paper is a very subjective activity; what is excellent for one reader is rubbish for another (think moderation on /.).
One simple way of beating this service is to search the web for similar papers written in a different language, perhaps found on servers in other countries. If you were smart enough to learn at least one other language other than your native language, this opens a whole new WWW out there. A student who engages in a translation effort may find that (a) he will absorb some of the material in the process; and (b) will likely add his own spin to the paper.
I would advocate changing the teaching methods rather than resorting to a service like this. Reduce the emphasis on papers and increase it on teaching people how to think.
Flame on,
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Colleges have these rights, because you signed a contract giving them to them at admission.
This isn't true in high school. You haven't granted any rights at all to your work to the school. Make your copyright explicit, place it at the bottom of every page, then sue your teacher when they submit it for inclusion in a database without the consent of the copyright holder.
One thing I haven't seen anyone post about this is the problem of trying to detect cheaters in a very basic class.
For example, I'm taking an introductory programming course at the moment, and the lab exercises tend to be solvable in a few minutes with the rudimentary Java skills we've acquired. How many ways can there be to answer these simplistic questions? Won't there be a tremendous false positive rate from this sort of thing?
Just how many "implement an alarm clock class" answers can there really be?
--saint
Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted
If I ran a service like that, I'd be tempted to skim off some of the papers, say... 10%, and market them to students who need a "gauranteed A".
As for turnitin.com owning the paper, are you sure it's not a non-exclusive license? If it's a non-exclusive license to use, they are just protecting themselves. If it's an actual copyright transfer than I wouldn't stand for it. It would be interesting to see a bunch of warez-swapping, MP3 trading students standing up for IP protection. It doesn't feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot, does it? I mean, after all, it's not like you lose any money by letting turnitin.com have the paper. How many students sell their papers anyway? Yada, yada, yada, all the same old AIP arguments turned on their head...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Of course the site is /.ed, so I can't get on and read their terms of service myself, but do they say they keep a copy of the paper, or that they own the paper (or something along those lines)? If all they say is that they keep a copy of the paper, that in no way changes the copyright or ownership of the paper. It doesn't give them the right to reproduce or distribute it in any way. Basically, they are saying they are keeping a copy of the paper to add to their database, in case someone copies this paper in the future. If they claim ownership or copyright of the paper, then there is a problem.
It similar to you giving someone a copy of a picture you took. They now own that copy, and can keep it, but it in no way gives them the right to reproduce it or do anything else with it, as they don't hold the copyright on it.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
IANAL, but as I understand copyright law, unless you sell the rights, or do a work for hire, you own the copyright - wether or not you mark the paper with the appropriate symbols. Failing to copyright may limit your damages to recover, but doesn't result in loss of ownership.
So, unless you specifically transfered the rights to the school, you still own th epaper - as an orginal work. It would be interesting to send a cease and desist letter to turnitin.com - demanding they remove all copies of your work from their database. Of course, it would take someoen with some moeny to enforce this and get a case to court, but wouldn't be interetsing if everystudent spent the 34cents to send them a "cease and desist" request. Some lawyer could even create a GPL'd one for them to cut and paste.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It seems to me like the larger the database gets the more likely it will be that your honest paper will get pegged to someone elses honest paper. If they have a database of say, 10 million papers, then it's conceivable that your paper will be similar to someone elses by sheer coincedence. In that case, will your work instantly be labled plagiarism? What about professors that don't bother to really compare the results of the search, and automatically fail anyone who the website indicates has a plagiarized paper? I smell lawsuits brewing.
If I were to submit a short story or a poem, no institution would dare to claim ownership. If I wrote a thoughtful essay, no institution would presume the right to sell it to a magazine. If I were to create a computer game, no institution would try to publish it.
Since this is all obvious on the face of it, it's clear that schools do not own their students' creations.
However, as someone further down the thread noted, the claim at Turnitin seems to apply to the content displayed on the website, not to the content submitted for review.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
Every class has a disclaimer presented to the student at the beginning of the semester, that cheating will not be tolerated if detected.
It seems many, many students, in undergraduate and graduate programs alike, are not interested in learning to get the grade.
I have seen it in my of my classes; students turn in another student's program, with minor modifications to foil a cursory examination, as their own. Sometimes this is done across semesters to try to foil a deeper inspection.
So what is a university to do? It's not fair to other students that cheaters go by undetected. And if students urn in work from 2, 3 or 4 semesters ago, how is the teacher to detect it? That amount of data to scan is overwhelming - you can't do it by hand within a reasonable amount of time. Besides, doing so requires access to work in previous semesters.
A database is the only way to do something like this, and frankly, I applaud the approach. However, I think schools should keep their own databases. Sure, it wouldn't detect cheating from other schools, but it also ensures that the student's work (which does remain the property of the student, right?) is only kept to check for cheating.
It's a difficult problem, and of course not possible to solve completely. But I think these measures will cut down on the amount of cheating that goes undetected.
I stumbled across this site as well..
www.homeworkanswers.net
Seems pretty empty, but it looks like it was just launched...
I was scratching my head at that headline for awhile...
One obvious solution to the whole thing would be - don't plaigarise and you won't need to bother checking with that website!
Or does that make too much sense?
I'm a 2000 man.
Then again, that's only works if you have a good professor, not one of those spooky kind that you never see and whose classes are taught by aids. It seems these days the student is growing farther and farther removed from the teacher: soon we'll have AI instructors for many subjects who give and grade assignments without ever going through human hands.
There is no problem with cheating.
Yes, thank you, now that you've stopped laughing. Let me explain. I'll use the analogy of two CS students.
Student one works hard and plays hard - though his idea of playing involves transferring CmdrTaco's intelligence into a bash script. He's a coder. He knows it, his friends know it (And often ask for help), and even his professors know it, taking the time to discuss interesting theories and programming practices with him.
Then we have Student two. Student two copies everything and anything around him to turn it in. His work is less than stellar, but it's actually enough to let him pass.
Sounds unfair, doesn't it? Wait. Student one and Student two graduate, and go job shopping.
They both get jobs, high paying jobs at that.
But what happens next? Student one climbs the ranks and is well rewarded.
Student two is terminated as soon as the managers figure out that he can't code his way out of a wet paper sack.
Though I guess he could always get a job at Microsoft in product testing. Hmm, guess there really is a problem after all.
(my gf is a TA, so I've seen it in action)
I'd like to see your girlfriend's TA action.
I'm a 2000 man.
a thousand students at a thousand typewriters for a thousand....
Seriously, if the site keeps a copy of every submission, is it not inevitable that a significant portion of text will be nearly identical to another?
Turnitin.com announced today that they will begin their new service of selling term papers (for research purposes only, of course).
I teach at a US university, and I am quite sure that an instructor has the right to keep a copy of everything that is turned in by the students as a part of coursework. Nobody freaks out about this, nor thinks their rights are being violated. It is also my right to consult with my colleagues regarding an assignment that is turned in to me. This pagiarism service does nothing more than what has been going on legally, though on a much smaller scale, at out universities.
Oh, and about worries whether these online services might falsely accuse someone of plagiarism, only total ignorance of how this works could give rise to such an objection. It's not like they send you email saying "your plagiarism test came out positive, congratulations". What they do is send you references to all of the original sources which share identical sections of text with the paper being investigated. Then I, the instructor, must decide whether the overlap between the paper and the other source is a symptom of plagiarism or of something else.
I have collegues who send every paper they receive to these services, and they catch many cheaters. Because I don't do this I might have missed some (but I like to think my assignments are so specific to my course that anything which is a cut and paste from the internet will not look like an answer to my essay question). However, when I get a paper I am suspicious about, I quickly OCR it and send it to plagiarism.org. They do five free checks per email address, and then charge you $1 for every additional check, which my department would pay if I wanted them to. It's great to call a cheating bastard into my office hour when you have absolute proof they cheated. I tell them I suspect plagiarism, and give them a chance to withdraw their paper (most of my colleagues are not this kind). So far, only one has refused. When she did I quoted to her a long passage from a website, which was identical to a section of her paper. Then I asked her to not return to my class. She got an F and the fact that she broke the law was appended to her permament university record. In this case I was very happy that finding incontrovertible proof was so little work for me, because I have better stuff to do than to search around for original sources. If it weren't for the website, I still would have known that she cheated; a couple of probing questions about the text she turned would reveal that. Still, I might feel torn about the F and the permanent black mark, because there are some people who can write stuff they can't explain verbally. With proof, though, I didn't need to feel torn at all.
Does it scour the internet? I post my essays and essay parts in some bulletin boards and websites. Does this mean that, upon finding my text online, it would flag me?
/.ed (there *ARE* some good things in the world)
Lets hope not.. thats garbage. I cant get to their site; its
First, as others pointed out, just submitting the student's work doesn't transfer ownership, so there's no issue there.
Outside of that, it's good to know such a service exists, as long as it's used right. I think a major news story that surprisingly turns up few hits on news sites was a recent case of a biology class in Kansas. The teacher outlined the grading of the course from day 1, and stated that a term-long paper would be worth 50% of their grade. When she got the papers in (electronically), she ran them through turnitin , and found 20-some papers were possible plagiarized works. Because she stated that the work had to be the students' own, she immediately gave these 20-some students F's on the paper, and thus, failing the course. Parents of the students complained, and they somehow managed to get the school board to overturn the teacher's grading such that the paper was only worth 30% of the total grade, and those that failed the paper still managed to pass the course. The results have been tremendous. The teacher quit her job. The school board has been sued. The district is looking towards shrinking numbers as parents pull kids out to others. And, possibly most importantly, the students themselves, once identified with the school district, are getting unwanted 'discrimation'; on NPR this morning, for example, one student from the district taking the AP test in a different town was identified as being from the district due to her shirt, and the test moderator told her "Oh, you're from XXX? Don't cheat now.". This is a very bad stigma to leave high school with, and those that didn't cheat might find their education hampered. (A bit of the news story is at Yahoo, though there's more than just this around.
Now, assuming I was in the same position, my first thing after seeing that turnitin reported that high a number would be to actually read the affected papers vs what the site said was being plagiarized. Not knowning the matching algorithm, there could be a lot of error, but assuming that it goes by long, equivalent phrases, there's a good change that it's not wrong. But spending the extra few hours to make sure that the site was correct would be absolutely necessary (I'm not sure if in this case the teacher did that. It sounds like she did double check as she was flabbergasted that that many students did cheat). I'd then confer with the principle or a similar figure to confirm the numbers (many schools do have a person to monitor cheating in the schools), and decide on the action. I think the teacher, assuming that the cheating was confirmed, did the right course of action and stuck to her guns. Could she have caught this without such a site, and assuming she didn't have sufficient programming skill to work out her own? Maybe, maybe not. I've done enough TA'ing that it's very hard on a problem set to detect cheating, but it can be found out. It gets even tougher using reports. Tools like this are very very helpful to find cheaters out. And it is necessary to do this, as cheaters can not only hurt themselves, but also their classmates' reputations as they progress through school.
So yes, it's a very good tool but like all other tools, it's only that. No tool is perfect and thus some human evaluation must be done to make sure the tool is right.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
You make it sound like it's the prime priority of a university to protect its reputation. Why would you think that? I think it's the prime priority of a university to educate its students. If they coast through by cheating, they're not taking the time to have their own thoughts, and when that happens, we fail as educators.
I guess the poster/editors felt that they couldn't use the word twice in one day. /. readers brains hurt.
Too many SAT words make
Legally, the contract is null. You cannot sign over any intellectual rights without a physical signature on a piece of paper. Period. The precedents on this one make it a open and shut case.
Implied licenses/agreements, the infamous EULA's, or even explicit licenses that do NOT have a signature cannot transfer the intellectual rights.
If a student submits a paper that was copied illegally, the student was never the rightful owner. How can turnitin.com now claim ownership?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com.
They can't do that. It's not legal. It doesn't follow the proper protocols for copyright assignment. They don't receive full copyright to you work just because they say so somewhere in a hidden license annoucement.
To transfer copyright you must *explicitly* do so in a manner involving consideration, signatures, etc.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
... but when it's back up I had better find a way to see if any of my work is being used on their site. I will then tell them to either remove it or start paying me. I'm not to thrilled that they are using MY work to make a profit.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Why worry about where the papers you are writing go. Personally if someone had used any papers I wrote in school for butt wipe I would be happy. No one is going to find anything great in that medicore term paper you wrote the night before it was due. More significant things in life to worry about like when is the next time I'm going to get laid or where to buy cheap beer.
Come on big money, no whammies...score of 1...
I'm a professor of writing and rhetoric at a major university English Department that has a subscription to Turnitin.com. I've used the service during its testing phase at our institution, and I have serious questions about the ethics of its use for many of the reasons that others have mentioned. For example, I would never ask all my students to submit all their papers through the service. I believe that the site should only retain papers for the purposes of comparison in their database and that this statement should be made explicitly in their terms. However, the developers of Turnitin.com have been responsive in the past. When educators raise ethical objections to the requirement that an SSN must be attached to any paper submitted, they removed this requirement from teacher submissions, which can now be anonymous. It is possible that they will be responsive to the concerns raised here, particularly if educators using the sites (like me) bring their concerns to the developers' attention. My guess is that the discussion here has gotten their attention since I can't log on to my account at the moment. In spite of the problems I have with the idea of plagiarism-hunting by faculty and administration (a pastime that seems rampant on my campus), I do find that there are pedagogically and ethically defensible uses of sites such as this. For example, I have submitted papers that I thought were plagiarized when I could not locate the original source material in a reasonable period of time. In all but one case, the papers were plagiarized in the technical sense of the word. Instead of treating this discovery as cause to call out the plagiarism police and begin formal proceedings, I began from the premise that the student did not intentionally plagiarize, that they were unable to use source material correctly because they didn't know how. I used the Turnitin report to show the student how they are copying other's words inappropriately (the report is color-coded and shows plagiarism very clearly). It lets me bypass the accusation/defense part of the plagiarism question and get to the let-me-teach-you-how-to-do-this-well part. As part of my faculty development work in the first-year writing program, I teach other teachers to use it this way as well. If you are a student, discuss your concerns with your teacher. S/he just may not have thought about the intellectual property concerns (though I'd like to think that teachers are more aware than that). Educators are the ones most likely to get Turnitin's policies changed.
The student is the holder of the copyright in the paper and nothing at turnitin.com changes that. The confusion here seems to come from the difference between the copyright and the copy. Giving someone a copy of your work does not give them the right to copy it. For example, if someone gives you a copy of Laurence Lessig's new book, you own the copy of the book--not the copyright (even if it was Mr. Lessig himself). He continues to hold the copyright and be able to use it and license it however he wants.
In fact, when one submits a paper, the professor can do whatever they want with their copy (e.g., throw it down the stairs, mark it with meaningful comments, give it away, etc.). There may be limitations on this freedom, depending on the implied or explicit limits of the transfer (e.g., you can have my paper to correct, grade, and return--but may not give to others). However, submitting it to be copied into a database is a violation of the students copyright, without the permission of the student. In practice, it seems likely that students are effectively giving permission if they are enrolled in a class that is using the service. Turnitin's rights in the database copy are definitely a little shady. If it turns out that turnitin is trying to further profit from the database (by sharing the papers with others), I could see some serious issues being raised about violation of the student copyrights.
I'm about to put a twenty-thousand dollar hit throught Jenny Craig to come find your ass and put you in a fat farm, you fat bitch!
I need to test this
At Lawrence University, we have an Honor System. All freshmen get informed of the Lawrence University Honor Code, and as students we reaffirm all our written assignments with the Honor Code. The Honor Code is policed by the Honor Council, a student/faculty organization that hears complaints about Honor Code violations. Faculty can report student papers to the Honor Council, and students who confess to violating the honor code are usually given lighter sanctions than students who deny involvement. All in all, it is a very effective solution that costs nothing to implement. Profesors can leave the room while we take exams knowing full well that all students are bound by the same code. The Honor Code gives students great flexibility with how we can do our assignments as well. And, since the Honor Council is an on campus organization, violations of the Honor Code are taken care of quickly. It is taken seriously by the students, and it encourages all of us to be fair in ways no web site ever could.
And on the home page, you can sign over all your intellectual property to me with a simple form. Maybe these guys should include a form to bid on the brooklyn bridge!
stuff |
I have been to 4 Universities at this point in my life, and only 2 of them have had a focus on educting the students. It is really sad, but true. Most profs at big universities are looking at the research they are doing, and pay very little attention to the students. The few that do usually don't get plagerized papers bc the students have a connection to the professor, and want to do a good job on their own for that professor. The real problem with higher education? Tenure!
I am a college professor, and while my area is mathematics and computer science, I have seen my share of cheating. Recently a student managed to steal a programming project from a student who was too liberal with write permissions on his account, and pass it off as his own.
Because of my experience at various universities, seeing what works and what does not, I have a draconian stance on honor policies. Suspend them on the first offense, expel them on the second (and even expel on the first if it is extreme enough). I say this, because this seems to be far more effective at reducing cheating than any tools you might have.
99% of all cheaters cheat poorly. The student above went through and modified all the comments and output statements, but forgot to remove the original student's name from the headers. These people are easy to catch and you do not need a service for them. Yes, it is a little harder with English and Philosophy papers, but by adding some unique flavor to your assignments (which you should do anyway), my colleagues can cut down on the material that they can copy.
The problem is prosecuting them. If you have a university with a weak honor code, students will cheat because they feel like they have nothing to lose. It is not enough to fail a cheater on the assignment -- he was going to fail anyway. Similarly, it is not enough to fail them in the course. You have to make the expected value of cheating horrendous.
And if the expected value is horrendous, all you have to do is catch those easy 99%. If students see others being caught and the sentences imposed, my experience has shown that the "casual cheaters" will think twice about cheating.
The set-up: I am not a lawyer, i am a senior computer science major at a decent sized private universtiy who has just started using turnitin.com (http://www.turnitin.com) OK...
The school just announced the use of turnitin.com in the school paper about 2 weeks ago. I have no problem with the school fighting plagerism. The university has a strong policy on it actually and im normally in support of it. But ive had friends who (before turnitin.com) have been accused of plagerism. Now ive been there when they've written the papers and even advised on a few of them. But what turnitin does is definatly a big gray cloud over academia. Is the world so corrupt as a company can make some $$ on this? unfortunatly yes. Is this going to hurt schools and their respective charges... namely students? yes. From my knowledge of copyright, anything that i put down in a tangeble format ( a paper for instance) is instantly protected under copyright law in the USA. As long as i put some originality into the effort that work becomes mine. You are allowed to quote given that you cite your work. When you dont cite, its just being a bad student. Now everyone misses things here and there. When i do research for a paper i may not use everything that ive read. So when im actually writing, a phrase or line that ive read may come up and im either a)not going to remember exactly where it came from (yes, i do that much research and thus alot of reading) or b) it sounded good somewhere else and it remained in my subconscience. Everyone retains certain phrases/actions/patterns that they pick up from different places. Ever notice that you start saying things your mom or dad said when you were a kid? same thing. Ill think that ive come up with a decent approach at something when it may have already been used. Does that make me guilty of plagerism if i honestly dont remember dealing with the same phrase during research?
There are too many gray areas for this debate to be ended anytime soon. From now on im making sure to put the copyright symbol on all my work and making it clear to my teachers that my work is my work. Any unauthorized use of it is copyright violation. I may even go so far as to have them sign an agreement that they will only use my paper for grading purposes and that anything beyond that requires my written permission. that means that any attempt to store, modify or transfer my paper to any other entity be it teacher or turnitin.com becomes a legal issue. Its not that i dont trust my teachers. I love them (yes my friends are laughing at me for this.) I have no desire to see any harm but i do need to protect my rights. NO i dont cheat but i dont want to be involved in something that has legal problems written all over it.
-Life is a Journey, --Not a Guided Tour! ---Trust me, I've already looked for the guide book.
So, they plan to search through every single chain of text for every single document in their database for every check?
I don't really think that's going to scale very well, unless they use some shortcut that cuts out a lot of the useful data.
For example the phrase "I enjoy Nintendo" has the following chains: "I", "I enjoy", "enjoy Nintendo" and "I enjoy Nintendo."... I suppose you could set a cap on the size of a chain (a large chain would have a small chain base). But still, that's a hell of a lot of data processing. I'm not sure they could honestly do it if they had a DB of say, a million documents.
And as far as these guys turning around and making a profit of this type of thing, well, I don't really think a teacher has the legal authority to turn over documents like that, they don't own the copyright to begin with.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I go to a big US univ. and I got nailed for cheating when a professor used a program to check for copying on software project. I certainly didn't cheat, and I didn't even let anyone see my code. It ended up the program caught some of the sample code he gave us which I used. Of course although I didn't cheat that time, I had cheated many times before on programming projects. I haven't copied since, so I would say this type of stuff does work as a detergent.
What a nice wrinkle in the permanent record structure our kids are going to be hung out to dry on.
Someday a bunch of pissed off people with dynamite and magnetic bulk-erasers are going to pry open the doors on compaines that do this kind of shit and beast-fsck them into oblivion.
Personally, if I didn't want to do the work I would just play video games, write programs, and make lame-ass excuses, and then ace all the exams and skate with a B or even a C. It wasn't until I got into college, and was paying for my education, that I wrote a research paper. Up until that point, there wasn't any real reason to put out the effort...almost all k-12 assignments are worthless exercies in conformity and control...well, worthless unless you consider your own enslavement a high-value high-priority.
And for all you assholes with your knee-jerk retorts about quality of education, public k-12 education doesn't mean dick. It's where you go, who and what your parents are, who they know and blow--and that's all part of social class.
Of course there's excellence within the paid-for education, and that's a couple of worlds removed from public k-12 where schools that profile and farm information for money are going to be the bread and butter of companies that trade on mistrust and teacher incomptetence.
And remember, often "Those who teach, can't". There is a great deal to be said about teachers who build character by catching young idiots in the act. Of course, this would require someone who knows how to teach about something real, like life. That kind of teacher is rare, and they're the ones that make all the difference. Note: Idiots are the ones that should be caught. Force everyone to honesty and there will be less art. Think about it, you'll get it eventually.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Shakespeare and Bach would never have made it. Not only did they, and most,if not all, of their contemporaries borrow heavily from the works of others, they frequently 'stole' from themselves. Artists, with few or no exceptions, spend their formative years painstakingly 'plagiarising' the works of the masters. Yet now we have become obsessed not only with copyright but with novelty. To what end?
Bertrand Russell spoke to assuming the mind of another in order to understand their work. Becoming another through their work to the point of inadvertantly plagairising isn't a bad thing and is as much a valid learning experience as the deft copy and paste job of a blatant theft.;-) Who's to say that the Forest Bueller's of academica are not the better students.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
Can't help but wonder if the other half of the ...
business model is selling papers. The tricky part
would be preventing your recently sold paper being flagged as copied.
I can see a time limit on the sale of the paper.
ie you only pass the plaigerism test for one month.
After all you want to be able to sell the good ones
again, and again , and again
Yeah, this is a creepy business practice, but CAVEAT EMPTOR!!! Translation: let the buyer beware.
This is just another dot-com wannabe who found a "niche market" to exploit not for the goods and services to be sold, but for the consumers to be harvested. Why do we continue to blast these scams while not taking any steps to blast or inform the people falling for them?
I've said it before, but i'll say it again... As long as people respond to spam, there will be spam. As long as people indiscriminately open every attachment they get, there will be e-mail worms. Add this to the list. As long as people freely give up personal information without concern for their own privacy, there will be companies out there bent on collecting personal information from them.
Until people wise up (hahahahahahahaha...) things like this will continue.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Step 1. Collect papers from Turnitin.
Step 2. Make available for P2P downloads.
Step 3. Listen to the wailing of Slashdotters for not respecting their ownership.
Step 4. Laugh at the irony.
1. We respect all of your comments. We stand behind the free flow of information.
2. Turnitin was created by educators to solve an important problem in academia: intellectual property theft (see #10, below). .
3. The technology was developed at U.C. Berkeley as a tool to allow students to Peer Review each others' manuscripts (see BARRIE, J.M. AND PRESTI, D.E. The WWW as an instructional tool. Science, 274(5286): 371-372, 1996.). The original idea concerned collaborative learning. .
4. Turnitin should only be used as a deterrent to plagiarism and not as a tool to catch cheaters (in fact, I believe the latter to be a misuse of our technology). .
5. Turnitin only 'sources-out' a manuscript. It does not determine whether or not a paper was actually plagiarized; that is left to the faculty member. .
6. Turnitin helps an instructor to insure that their students are all playing by the same set of rules (not unlike a football or basketball referee). It levels the playing field. .
7. Technology similar to Turnitin has been used in computer science departments (whether you know it or not) for over a decade. .
8. All work submitted to Turnitin remains the property of the author. .
9. According to the Fair Use clause of the US Copyright Act, Turnitin makes a transformative use (and therefore Fair Use) use of the original work which does not violate the intellectual property rights of the author. .
10. Final thought, "A person's published words are the product of a great deal of training, thought, and effort. To represent another's thoughts as one's own is at best misrepresentation. Plagiarism is a substitute for writing, and so a substitute for thinking. At worst, it is theft of intellectual property, and therefore represents a serious challenge to the integrity of academia" - Dr. Michael M. Todd.
We respect the ideas and concerns discussed in this Slashdot thread.
As far as I know, my university (Uinversity of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, eh?) does no such thing. Faculties maintain their own banks of papers, projects and programs, and compare the students' submissions when they are handed in. They're suprisingly good at catching students (and the students are suprisingly stupid - I heard that once half a class handed in the same assignment), and I've heard no mention of subscribing to any knid of centralized system where other universities' projects are also considered.
This makes me wonder as to how big a problem this is. Are a lot of universities doing this? Are they small ones or big ones? Do schools like MIT do it? It seems to me that this is some sort of an attempt at a cost-effective, effortless solution that smaller schools would go for, and would factor into the quality of education they provide. As long as big schools do their own thing, the glorious, presigious ideal will remain to stay away from such crap and students will know what they're getting into when they end up at Smith & Sons U.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Where are the rights of the student?
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-ha-ha-ha HE-HE-HE-HE-HE HA-HA-HA-HA cough-cough-cough.
If there are enough papers in this thing it will detect false hits. One should also consider that some papers will have a right and a wrong answer, leading to more similarity than those which are opinion only. History springs to mind.
Carpe Deez
Also call me critical, but the Copyright Act since 1976 has provided that a copyright attaches AUTOMATICALLY when a work is fixed in a medium, regardless of whether a copyright notice is affixed. If this company is keeping copies of papers submitted by professors for use in their future searches, IMHLO (L = Legal) they have created a derivative work in violation of the student's copyright. The Professor's submitting to the site is an act of contributory infringement. Can anyone say "class action lawsuit" ?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Actually, she didn't resign rather than change the grades. The school board overturned her grades rather than make her do it.
She resigned shortly after she went into the class and the 28 students basically taunted her, saying that they didn't have to do anything she said. So I guess they learned something after all. (I have the article hanging in my cubicle, but I'm at home right now.)
And these same people are no doubt baffled by how Enron could ever have happened.
gm
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
I am a graduate student and teach an introductory level course. Now because the department I teach in is called Popular Cultre, most people think that all we do is watch movies and critique them (an before anybody makes any jokes about my chosen discipline at least go to the department's website beforehand, ok?) So if one of our students decide they want to write about the Simpsons, some of them get papers off of the web. Well, guess what? They very often stick out like a sore thumb because they are just biographies or rolling stone style fan worship pieces. In short, they aren't cultural studies papers.
In my department we have had kids cut and paste stuff from amazon.com, roling stone, and most commonly the first search result that comes up from google. I haven't caught any of my students, perhaps that is because I am a technology guy and I show them sites like turnitin.com and scare them (of course I don't tell them you have to pay to use it), either that or really am stupid.
And that is how I look at plagiarism. If they turn in a plagiarized paper, they are basically insulting my intellegence and saying that I'm too stupid to catch them. I have been in college for quite a while and I've done all my own work and so should they. I would take great joy in nailng the bastard to the wall if they did plagiarize in my class. We had several cases last semester (one kid even was so dumb that when we confronted her she with the web site that the paper was from she asked, "Is it plagiarism if I got it from someone who turned it in last semester?), so plagiarism is on the rise, at least in our department. However, as I said, I make a concerted effort to show them that I know where to get free papers as well as where to check them and so I haven't had a problem with suspicious papers.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
If you're worried about this, just put a copyright symbol on your paper. If you're really worried, you can join the Writers' Guild of America, and register all your work with them. It's not that hard...
So how does one classify when something is first posted? I post first, so everyone who posts next is guilty of plagiarism? I don't get how one determines when the first instance of a paper was written.
I am a college students keenly aware of just how crappy most college papers are. Any company that would voluntarily subject itself to reading thousands of crappy college papers are either deserving of some sympathy or else they are masochists.
(me, in my last semester of college actually feeling a bit sad that nobody will ever pay me to write a paper about plato again...)
sig my booty, check my website
I believe that the purpose and methodolgy of the site is clear. I have used it personally to catch some kids' plagiarisms. The reality is that Google can usually find the same essays they do and it doesn't take 24 hours nor more than 10 words. Granted, Google doesn't provide a report stating the percent similarity; but you can print out the copy of the essay from which the student copied.
Actually Turnitin doesn't own the papers - it passes them on to trick_turnitin.com, where students can register and download papers. With the guarantee that Turnitin will give a nice "absolutely original work" rating to anything you buy from trick_turnitin.com.
Now _that_ would be a cool business plan - fleecing both the kids and the profs.
--- RK
Plagarism it not some undefined thing that is hard to understand. It is clear cut...taking someone elses words or ideas and labeling them as your own without crediting them. There is a simple rule, don't use someone else's words or ideas without giving them credit, and you haven't plagarised anything. Now there is no need to submit your paper to any website. You can't accidently plagarise someone's words. You have to willfully copy someone else's words or ideas to commit the crime. The basis for the website in the article is absurd and not even worth wasting the Slashdot community's time with.
"No Comm, No Bomb"
On a related note, they also use an extensive internet search for matching phrases. Crazy.
Not all cheaters are idiots.
Back when doing the starving-student thing, I used to do projects-for-hire for students taking computer science classes at the local university. Certainly, my rates weren't cheap -- but then, each student ponying up got a different implementation (complete with different program structure, different coding style and different bugs) finished in record time (this was back when I could pull long strings of all-nighters). Not only did my clients never get cought, a great deal of care was taken to be sure they wouldn't have even if the code turned in by each taker had been directly compared by a TA or professor -- or by a service like the one discussed here.
Personally, I consider this reasonable -- if someone is willing to pay enough to outsource their work (in real life or academia), so be it. If one wants the grade in the class to accurately reflect the real-world ability, on the other hand, a good honor code is probably the Right Way to do it -- cuz anything less Just Won't Work.
Further, cheating once doesn't necessarily mean one can't learn on one's own -- a year later a team composed of two of my former clients beat me in the annual ACM programming competition (them taking 1st and myself 2nd locally). Heh.
As for the moderators to this post, you should be able to recognize someone puffing up his/her ego by sacrificing accuracy. It certainly does not warrant the scores I'm seeing.
For those who actually want to learn more about copyrights, fair use, and how they apply to you, start your research at the Stanford Fair Use website. The next logical step for US citizens would be to visit the US Library of Congress site on copyrights. Good luck!
assert(expired(knowledge));
Does the univerisity claim ownership of all work produced by a student?
If not, how can the univerisity assign the copyright of something that isn't theirs?
Its kind of like me going to a Disney movie and then giving the copyright to my friend because Disney showed it to me.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I am an editor, and I submitted a chapter of a highly suspect book I was working on to Turnitin...
and from the usage policy:This web site is for your personal and noncommercial use. You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from this web site. A user may not market, rent, lease, or re-license the licensed programs or services, or use the licensed programs or services for third party commercial use, commercial timesharing, or service bureau use.
An attacker sniffing on the network could intercept any student's work submitted to this service by the teachers and use it to whatever extent he might think of...
Beware!
I though everyone knew that Turnitin is a subsidary of www.schoolsucks.com! They have to claim ownership of papers so that they can publish them on their other OTHER site.
Ya know, I seem to remember that there's an old adage about giving a room full of monkeys typewriters, and eventually one of them will produce a copy of Shakespear...
Basically what it says is that eventually, someone, somewhere, will write something exactly like someone else without being connected to them... (Quantum mechanics perhaps... nevermind).
At any rate, the gist is that you can't absolutely PROVE BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT that anyone cheated unless one of the parties to the alleged plagarism admits to it.
There's sooooo many ways to poke holes in this thing:
1) The program had a flaw...
2) The program's code is unaudited...
3) Even if #2 applies, the auditors could have made a mistake...
4) The teacher submitted the wrong paper(s) under different names and created the problem...
5) The teacher's computer had a flaw and what the teacher thought he was submitting wasn't actually that at all...
6) What constitutes plagarism? Is it at least possible that two similar phrases COULD have been independently written by two individuals who happened to attend the same lectures and were in the same class?
Re: the copyright issues:
1) Student holds the rights to his independent or derivative works...
2) Just don't grant a license to the prof/teacher/drone to submit anything anywhere w/o express written permission, and payment of a license fee.
3) Sue turnitin.com to remove all of your works from the database. Go for an injunction to prevent them from placing any works into the DB w/o express written consent of the copyright holder for EACH paper. They'll rapidly go out of business.
4) If ANYONE in the DB is under 13, then these fools have to comply with the US COPA law - let the FTC go after them...
5) Just because you go to school doesn't mean you give up all your rights. There are certain things that the school can do in loco parentis, but they can't get away with everything. Stealing your copyrighted work is definately something that's considered capricious...
6) Schools can't do things that are arbitrary and capricious. Using some program that is itself likely flawed, to detect alleged plagarism without any real proof is arbitrary and capricious to say the least...
Sue the school. Sue turnitin.com. Sue whomever sent the paper(s) to turnitin.com. Sue whomever funds this crap.
And put appropriate licensing language into the papers.
Cover page: Copyright (c) 200x, by A. B. Student. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Next page: Limited License. A.B. Student ("author"), hereby grants to C.D. Teacher ("instructor") a limited license to review this work without charge for the sole purpose of determining general compliance with the assignment for which it was produced, and assigning a grade appropriate with the quality of the work. This work may not be assigned, transferred, distributed, reduced to any form (electronic or otherwise) without the express written permission of the author. This work may not be utilized by the instructor for any purposes other than those specifically enumerated above. Violation of any portion of this license may result in civil and/or criminal penalties......"
OR:
Put a shrinkwrap license on top of the first page, and shrinkwrap the whole thing... Right back at these jerks...
(by the by: I copyrighted ALL of my code and notes when I was in college... so I know what I'm doing here...)
if you don't like a service don't use it. If you read the legal agreement to the service and don't like it... wait you know whats coming... don't use the service.
Just another call answered by the ignorance police.
I like things that are sweet and not things that are lame. --
Although I would love to see an honors system that worked, I'm currently in college, and that makes me deeply cynical about the prospects for its success. I do well on assignments- on my own- but unfortunately this leads to an incessant stream of questions such as "can I copy your hw?", "I need 'help' writing a paper", and the ever-popular "Can I sit next to you on the test?" from my fellow students. The fact of the matter is that many of the students at high schools and colleges are, to say the least, lazy- even in the honors program at my high school (ranked in the top 200 public high schools in the country, last time I checked), people routinely tried to buy and sell papers (including the valedictorian, who was caught selling them). Rather than do work, many of these students cheat and hope that they're not caught, using either websites with freely available term papers, or simply cutting and pasting much of their work. So, even if it means running my papers through something along with everything else (which doesn't bother me, since my papers are original anyway and a quick perusal of copyright law ensures that they'll remain that way or else), I'd rather see the cheaters caught than trust in an honors system that encourages people to cheat and not be caught Come to think of it, the Washington Post ran an article last year which slashdot covered, about a professor at a college with such a system who ran a check and found several hundred plagiarized papers- it's become easier than ever for students to cheat, and they do. This detracts not only from my own education, in that cheaters can receive higher grades for a weekend of partying than I do for a week of work, but also from the overall atmosphere (as I attempt to discourage people from trying to copy my work).
what happens when there data base gets so large that almost any paper looks like a plagerism. if you have a common subject that is written about by 100,000's of students over time do to the fact that it is the same subject you are going to get a bunch of papers that look the same naturaly.
It parallel to the Napstar debate. It is easier and easier to copy, and harder to prevent it.
Perhaps instructors can give a set of parameters that students must fit into their papers. It is much harder to cheat that way. However, the paper may not make a whole lot of sense.
Table-ized A.I.
My high school, St. Petersburg High School, has a magnet program that is a member school of the International Baccalaureate program and the mandate by the IBO is that teachers assure that all papers submitted to IB are the students own work. They use the Turnitin.com service to make this assurance. As a student at this school writing these papers I find the Turnitin.com system to be a valuable way to deter cheating. While it is not an absolute way of catching cheaters (not by a long shot) it does allow teachers to spend more time concerning themselves with grading accuracy rather than checking papers for cheating. The service allows their papers to be checked against not only every other paper from this year, but also all the papers from previous years. Given the proliferation of the internet in our society, cheating has become much easier than ever before and the Turnitin.com service makes it easier to keep honest people honest.
There are drawbacks of course. If teachers just take the report on what it says and do not investigate furthur then it does a disservice to the student. A system needs to be set in place where students who have been flagged by the system can sit down with the teacher and discuss the paper to determine if it was cheating or just a chance flagging. At our school how accusations are handled is the teacher will sit down with the student and ask them questions about different ideas in their paper. This gives them a chance to show their knowledge of the topic and explain their paper, explain their sources etc. This gives the student a chance to show their knowledge and ideas as their own because often a cheater has not completely researched a topic and has only skimmed through someone elses ideas.
As a student the possibility that I lose ownership to my work disturbs me. But I will need more information on that before I make a judgement.With an effective system to handle flags by the Turnitin.com system, it can be an effective tool to deter cheating. But as it was once said "Locks only keep honest people honest." and no there is no fool proof system to prevent cheating. "Those who aim to produce a fool proof system, will be surprised at the ingenuity of fools."
All sigs are created equal.
...what they're doing. When I was a CS TA, we used to get some good laughs off the people who copied the work of someone else who obviously didn't know WTF was going on. You're right, there are not that many ways to implement something trivial like an alarm class correctly. But there are a fair number of creative ways to bungle it if you don't have a clue, and if two people blow it in exactly the same absurd way it tends to make the graders wonder if there might be a connection. A closer look might show that the programs are identical (whitespace, comments, etc.) EXCEPT for the variable names (I guess they figured that would be too obvious)...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
IANAL, and I have no idea whether turnitin.com's use of the student papers it collects is transformative, but it doesn't matter. From what I understand, turnitin.com is copying the student papers in entirety and storing them in a database. Further, these papers are generally unpublished. So two of the four prongs (fraction of work copied is 100%, and material is unpublished) weigh against turnitin.com. Effect on market value is totally unpredictable--if my paper contains original research then disclosing its contents to a third party (say because it contained a properly-cited quotation that matched a similar quotation in someone else's paper and the match was flagged as possible plagiarism) could result in destroying a news scoop. So they could get clobbered on a third prong as well, depending on the situation.
I'm generally on the GPL-supporter, relax-restrictive-IP-law side of things but turnitin.com reminds me too much of a police state. I would not give them permission to copy and store my papers and I would not expect them to be able to successfully defend a fair use claim when they do such massive appropriation of other people's work.
I also don't see how turnitin.com can work without requiring students to submit all their papers electronically rather than on dead tree pulp, but I've been out of school for a few years and don't know whether that's normal practice these days.
final projects of her 110 HS sophmore students. She found 28 had cheated on the project
If a quarter of her students managed to find and copy a paper from the internet, this suggests to me that 1) The question it's self was not very original, and was probably copied it's self. 2) That she used a third party Web site to mark the paper re-inforces this view. 3) She does not understand the difference between good research and plagarism.
...http://termpaperdatabase.net
This statement seems to contradict itself, even if the first part were partially true. First, from the official website:
How can this not be "a tool to catch cheaters"? Plagiarism is, by definition, a form of cheating. To determine that a passage is plagiarised is to catch the alleged author cheating. Is there a difference between catching someone cheating and determining whether you're catching someone cheating?As for the parenthesized part of #4: What other direct use is the service, than that it "gives users the ability to determine for themselves [...] plagiarized or original"? How can it be a deterrent unless: (a) the teacher is allowed to use the service to catch cheaters (in which case #4 is a lie); or (b) the teacher is not allowed to use the service to catch cheaters (in which case the only deterrent is the possibility that the teacher might be misusing the "service" anyway)? It seems that, logically, either the service is misrepresenting itself to the teacher, or the teacher is cheating by misrepresenting himself to the student.
I don't know whether this is considered relevant to Turnitin's business or not; however: #7 only means that, for 10 years, several teachers have been violating the trust of those who paid them more-or-less based on their trustworthiness as teachers. I doubt it seems ethical to most honest students to force them to contribute their work without authorization (or with manditory so-called "authorization") to a sting operation or similar uses without a court order. If the students were happy to submit their papers for comparison, that's one thing. But it seems like this business model depends on a huge number of students being either coerced by circumstances or silently exploited for uses they don't approve of.
Even if it's not Turnitin's job to treat students with respect, it's still the teachers' job, so one might wonder the integrity of any school participating in this without the informed and uncoerced consent of the non-cheating student authors. Just in case the list goes away later, here's a list of the schools participating in Turnitin (from Turnitit's own list on 2002-03-05):
The University of California System - Georgetown University - Cornell University - Duke University - The California Institute of Technology - Colgate University - Rice University - Boston University - Villanova University - The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities - Rochester Institute of Technology - Rutgers University - US Military Academy, West Point - Tulane University - Trinity College - Swarthmore College - Wesleyan University - The Citadel - The University of Western Ontario - The University of Leeds, UK - Manakau Institute of Technology, New Zealand
My personal opinion, which probably isn't worth anything: If the school you're applying to is on this list, ask them where they keep the consent forms for these submissions. If they tell you that they don't need permission-- well, then at least you know how you'll be treated. Not that Turnitin or any school would ever exploit your work for profit-making non-research purposes without compensating you beyond the education already pledged to you.
Read this story... damn, she's busted! She worked for PBS and was a judge on the Pultizer Prize. [see above Drudge Rpt story]
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I Turnitin holds and uses my term paper to 'validate' other people's papers, shouldn't I be able to charge them for using my work? After all, since they are using my material to make a profit, I should have the right to be compensated. IT IS MY COPYRIGHTEN MATERIAL after all. ;)
Typical Catholic school these days. What kind of organization that's responsible for influencing minors hawks merchandise on their front page? At least someone was smart enough (or dumb enough) to give them a .com instead of a .org.
Peoria Notre Dame (in Illinois) had the same priorities, but several years back, they didn't have the savvy to know what the web was yet. Their trick to getting extra cash was to force the entire student body to walk around downtown Peoria during the middle of the business day once or twice a year. Oh-- and tell all the kids that it was manditory that they get a certain amount of pledges from God-only-knows-who for this "charity event", under the threat of discipline from the school for intentionally refusing a homework assignment. Neat, huh? By the way, the practicing bishop at the time was John J. Myers, who has now been rewarded for that and other "good work" by being appointed archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. Praise Jesus and pass the plate-- and if you don't have time for both, you know which one is important right now...
Yet another reason not to trust your (children's) education to people who have goals "more important" than aiming for objectivity, respect for people regardless of their power, and open, critical thinking.
I'm not too sure why anyone would be worried about losing their copyrights through this service. When you submit any project through University, you give up your rights of copyright. University has full control over who sees your work and under what circumstances. Why do you think professors/students must submit a release request when they spin off their work into the private sector?
Why is it that Slashdot only wants to protect the rights of the "artist" when that artist is a student whose work - at best - should probably be viewed as "work for hire" of the corporate entity (school) they are attending? Yet, if an artist recording music (also probably legally a work-for-hire situation) wants that same protection we cry RIAA conspiracy? While a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, it seems to me that inconsistency in application of principles is the quintescience of hypocratic thinking.
Don't you mean
school boards will always defend the rights of stupid teachers!
Aha, you have copied part of your assignment! Off to the Academic Standards Committee with you!
As a professor at a small liberal arts college that uses Turnitin.com, I am very familiar with the arguments for and against the use of this kind of service. I was initially concerned, like the writers of many of the posts here, that use of such a service would undermine any sense of implicit trust in the classroom. This concern, however, as I have found in my last few years teaching, has already been made moot by the students themselves: this trust exists today in theory only, and is violated, with impunity, by students on a regular basis. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply not looking hard enough, or is in denial. Consequently, I find that the most vocal opponents of use of services like Turnitin.com (who incidentally also invoke the whole litany of high-minded, anachronistic IP rhetoric thrown about here at slashdot) are those very same students who find they will now have to start writing their own papers. In discussions in my classes, I have found that most students actually support using Turnitin.com, simply because they know many of their peers plagiarize, and like myself and my colleagues, are just sick of it. Sure, in an ideal educational environment, there would be no place for a service like Turnitin.com. And I'd love to be able to treat my students (and their work) with the measure of respect called for by many of the posts here. I'll do so when my students start to earn it.
When I graduated from NCSU, the CSC dept. had just
started using a program developed to analyze source code for copying. It was supposedly very smart. It could tell if the code was the same even if variables/functions/loops etc... changed names or positions in the code. I think that the program was developed at a University in Virginia? or maybe some other edu on the East Coast, can't remember. It actually may be the same program that drives turnitin.com... who knows...