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?

Comments

Re:Placebo?

[sidesh0w]

I think the word they were looking for was "panacea", a cure-all for plagiarism.

Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the site offers services to help educational institutions detect plagiarised work which is submitted to them. To do so, the site must a) Check the internet against the work for similarities and b) Check other work against this one, also for similarities. So they must hang on to all work given to them in order to do this.

Where's it say they get rights to the papers?

[emcron]

Where, exactly, in the User Agreement does it say that the company gets the papers? - Emcron

Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me

[baptiste]

Turnitin.com is a site which many school suse to catch students copying papers. It will highlight even small passages that appeared in other works screened by the service. Thus every time a teacher submits a paper, it gets scanned and regardless if any plagarism is found, the paper is added to the database to be scanned against in the future. When a paper is scanned, the potentially plagarised sections are highlighted with links back to the original source. What the teacher does with a plagarised paper is up to them.

The trick is, when papers are submitted to be checked, Turnitin.com is claiming ownership of the paper without the consent of the author since the teacher is the one who submitted it.

Re:Where in their user agreement?

[dallen]

The site description says that teachers can come to "their own turnitin.com Report Inbox" to review submitted assignments. So the reports become part of turnitin.com. From the usage policy: starting at the second paragraph:

PERSONAL AND NONCOMMERCIAL USE LIMITATION

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.

COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK NOTICES:

All contents of this web site are: Copyright (c) 1998-2001 iParadigms, LLC, iParadigms Corporation and/or its suppliers.

Trust relationship with students?

[gosand]

Sorry, but my fiancee just got done with her Masters, and taught at a university for 3 years. She taught foreign language classes, and told the students - Do not use internet translators. They did. All the time. Some students would get Fs on their papers, because they used a translator, and the next paper - translated on the internet. There is no trust because students are stupid and lazy. All of them? No. But those are the ones that stand out, and the ones that are the reason that companies like turnitin.com exist. Teachers would have to treat all papers the same, or face the accusation of preferential treatment. So it is either all or nothing, and I understand why teachers would use this service.

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.

NPR: turnitin.com involved in Kansas "scandal"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cheating hurts the cheater's classmates

[marhar]

it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.

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.

No, really, what are they talking about?

[kilroy_hau]

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.

Re:Panacea, not Placebo

[xenocide2]

Nonsensical. If you stopped and thought about your suggestion for a moment, you might discover that IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. "Turnitin.com - Cure for everything or worse?"

The submission is making a case against turnitin.com suggeseting that at best it does nothing(placebo), and quite possibly could be harming people(or worse).

Thanks for playing the anal retentive game, but there aren't any consolation prizes. Just a sore ass.

Re:The question is simple

[SymphonicMan]

(My high school uses this service)

One major misconception running around here right now is that the instructor submits the papers. This is not true. The students create an account on the site, join a virtual "class" on the site using login information given to them by their instructor, and then are asked to submit their own papers by the instructor.

-SymphonicMan

From the creators of Turnitin.com

[jmbarrie]

My name is John Barrie, and I am one of the original founders of Turnitin.com. After reading Foo Shackelford's comments regarding Turnitin.com, along with the comments of others on the Slashdot list, I would like to clarify our position on some of the issues discussed:

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.

Violating their own TOS

[Compulawyer]

On the home page, they crow about helping educators reduce plagarism and even post a quote from a supposed UC Berkeley Prof (maybe he really is and really said what they claim - I haven't checked). However, in the Usage Agreement, there is an express limitation prohibiting "commercial use." Call me suspicious, but it seems that a professor engaged in his profession and checking papers of students is engaged in a "commercial use."

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" ?

Enron nascent....

[gila_monster]

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