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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?
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.
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.
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.
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
They can hold on to it for checking, sure, but why should it become their property? I don't think the company is malicious in this case, just needs to clarify its TOS and what it can/cannot do with papers - ie "we reserve right to hold on to them for verification in database, but we will not attempt to republish them or make any other revenue or claims to ownership on them."
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'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.
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.
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"...
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
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.