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.

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!