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:From my own experience...

[Clay Mitchell]

heh if i had moderation rights today, i'l have to decide if this was insightful, funny or flame bait.

i guess who the audience is eh?

Re:From my own experience...

[Leven Valera]

I can tell you that if turnitin.com is anything like slashdot, they'll just mod the paper into oblivion if it doesn't jive with the editors' opinions [slashdot.org]. But hey, what do I know?

Shh...the admins...they'll hear you...they're everywhere...they'll $rtbl us both...

LV