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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?
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
I think you're missing the point. The teacher might be the one turning it in to check the paper, while the student is the one that has a problem with it because now their work became the property of this site. Of course you could not use the site yourself, but the question here is about the legality of the TOS and options for students.
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The question is whether the teacher owns the paper (technically, the copyright thereof) or not. If the teacher doesn't own the paper, then they can't give up your rights to it (otherwise all copyrights on mp3s would no longer exist once they had been shared a couple of times...). If the teacher does own the paper, then this would be legal, but I wonder if the school system would always want to be doing this.
I'm betting that the teacher doesn't own the paper, except perhaps in very special circumstances that qualify as "work for hire". But for the average term paper, the student wrote it, and what you write is automatically (c) you.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
no it's not. If I take a class then, unless i sign a contract to the contrary, my work belongs to me. I'd like to see them try and sue me over the matter. For that matter, i wouldn't mind seeing a lawsuit brought when turnitin.com publishes a compendium of essays.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
"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." Most of my Engineering classes were graded on a curve... so if you can cheat your way to setting the curve, then you ARE hurting other people.
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!
You may have already signed a contract, though. What if a university gave you a bunch of papers to sign at the beginning of each quarter/semester/whatever? Have you read all of them, as well as all the papers they have given you? The paper may very well be classified as "work for hire" or some other nonsense. The scary thing is really that the teachers/university may have full power over your papers and schoolwork.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Actually to cover the marketing info...
In their privacy policy it states:
"Access to personal information by third parties will only occur via signed consent by registered users as stated in our registration agreement."
Followed by...
"Student personal information is used for upload identification, market research or statistical purposes only."
So technically, if they release that information, without your consent, then it's a violation.
Hypothetically speaking though, if someone shares your personal information with our without your consent, is that plagarizing?
Nobody is going to arrest you for plagarism, it just weakens the structure of intellectual society and is therefore a good way to get blacklisted (or kicked out of school). Unethical-- but not illegal.
-m
because students use the service themselves FIRST and then change their paper until it passes.
I can't get to the site now to see how this works, but there must be a switch that says "don't add the paper I'm checking to your database" otherwise this would never work. Each of their changes would be recorded and show up as something similar to the submitted paper. And the paper that didn't get any hits would be added to the database, so that when the professor checked it, the paper turned in would come up as an exact match of the last paper checked by the student.
Could somebody who actually got to the site elaborate?
If it's closed source, just make sure your professor has to sign a NDA before they can read it!
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:
Actually, I think term papers and whatnot are considered property of the university. Check your university's academic policy (I'm quite possibly wrong, but that was the policy when I graduated a couple of years ago).
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
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."
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