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

The question is simple

[JohnHegarty]

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.

Re:well obviously

[erasmus_]

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.

Turnitin.com central to Kansas cheating scandal

[bedmison]

Check out this story from the Kansas City Star.

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!

Re:Canned response to English instructor:

[magic]

Note (not to ruin the joke) that plagarism is not a crime. It doesn't refer to copyright violation (which is a crime) but to dishonesty. Plagarism occurs when an author implicitly asserts that something is new and original work and it is not. It is even possible to self-plagarize (this happens a lot in scientific circles) by claiming the same work is new in two different places. Students who insert sections of a highschool report they wrote into their freshman college paper are guilty of this.

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

Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me

[jd142]

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?

I think this is a great service...

[Masem]

...as long as it's used correctly.

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.

Re:Placebo?

[zangdesign]

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).