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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?
I'm turning in a paper that was blatantly plagiarised so I can get my sugar pill!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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. But hey, what do I know?
there's that same big block of legaese at the beginning that will trigger the filter every time :-)
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.
Plagarism? That's preposturous! That paper was licensed under the GPL! I had every right to copy it and modify a few words here and there, as long as I made the paper available to others...
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
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.
It would help if someone can find the line/paragraph in question and post it. I can't. Anyway, I will never GPL my paper to protect it.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
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 think the word they were looking for was "panacea", a cure-all for plagiarism.
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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TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"That's right, it's closed source and encrypted, but you can ask me questions about it, which I may or may not answer."
"Umm.."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You mean it doesn't actually check anything, it just makes you think it has?
--- I hate my sig
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
The trick is, when papers are submitted to be checked, Turnitin.com is claiming ownership of the paper without the consent of the author since the teacher is the one who submitted it.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
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
Who's willing to put down some money that TurnItIn.com is the front end to a research paper selling service?
"Give us your work. We'll use it to make sure no is using it (without paying us first)"
Maybe not, but I'd get a kick and a chuckle out of it...
Th
...misspell your BigWords. Pretty darn tough to get caught if, for instance, you use "placebo" when you really mean "panacea."
I know, there's a risk the professor might actually read your paper and discover that you're illiterate, but it's a pretty slim risk...
...'cause most professors just toss the papers down a staircase, and grade 'em based on distance.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Somebody is losing out on compensation here. Someone call the RIAA, MPAA or something like that...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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"
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.
You can take plagerized texts, run it through this software and then keep tweeking it until it no longer sets off the filter alarm.
chiefly for two reasons:
1. As mentioned in the story, turnitin.com acquires copyright of the content. I've read the license and nowhere do they guarantee that they shall not misuse content that's been uploaded. (Although they do prohibit any other person from using others' content... that'd be interesting actually, they'd be party to the plagiarizing!)
2. Part of the license also says that the content can be used by the US Government, particularly by a defense related agency. That only means, that the CIA could come snooping in on innocuous content and the next thing you know, they'd start suspecting us of treason and subterfuge.
Surely, any university worth its name in salt can come up with some kind of a plagiarism-detecting software system. Or better still... maybe someone could come up with an Open Source version of turnitin.com's software. What say guys?
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.
but i don't plagiaise, i'm not in school, and i've other things to do than race towards a placebo for plagiarists, or even panacea for plagiarists.
-f
www.blackant.net
Where are the rights of the student?
Students don't seem to have rights any more. They are more or less a commodity used to pad out a spreadsheet.
--saint
Teachers are not paid nearly enough for what they are worth, so do I blame them for using a service like this? Not really. There are potential disasters, where something is tagged as plagiarism when it is not, but that is a process issue that could be overcome with the teaching administration.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If a service accuses you of plagiarism, it is up to an actual human being to then compare the student's work to the suspected document to be sure. To simply accuse someone without supporting evidence is asking for trouble.
There could very likely be false positives. There would probably have to be to some extent. It can't look for perfect matches, as simply changing the name would be enough to thwart that detection. And if it matches too closely, any common phrase of more than seven or eight words, while somewhat unlikely, is certainly not beyond the realm of reason. Any legitimate quoting could set this off easily.
It would also be difficult to detect the student who did a little bit of work and paraphrased the paper. While all the topics, references, and issues would be the same, the entire paper would be written with different words, and a simple grep would be practically useless. And you can't exactly do matches on topic, since likely that much WOULD be in common between the two papers.
Likely the service is in place to detect the obvious cheaters. And since it and other similar systems seem to be finding quite a few, its probably not unjustified. Even more so when hoardes of the accused don't come up screaming about it later.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Suppose you turn in (original) work which just barely deserves an A. Then suppose that your classmates turn in plagarized work which would deserve a strong A if they were not plagarized.
You then have the case either where everybody gets an A (and your grade is diluted, because your class/school gets a reputation for grade inflation), or you get a B because the other pieces of work are better than yours.
I have been in classes where I suspected other people of cheating, and I did not like it one bit when they got a better grade for it.
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.
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.
Where are the rights of the student?
Simple. Students have a right to not submit their work to turnitin.com. They cannot claim ownership of papers that have not been submitted to them.
If a student's instructor submits the paper to turnitin.com, I do not see how they can claim ownership. Simply put, my instructor can't give up my property rights. Only I can do that. This follows along the same lines as my friends not being able to give away my car.
I don't really see a problem here. If you don't like their TOS, don't use them. The Free Market economy will take care of the rest.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
17% match with CP/M
23% match with BSD
32% match with Apple OS
34% match with DEC VMS
16% match with Borland
Summary:
112% matches with other source bases (indicates
mutual plagarism)
0% original code
Or also, why is it okay for us to ignore other people's copyrights with music etc, but not okay for them to ignore ours? I smell the waft of a hypocrisy!
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I can't find anywhere on the site this company says they own the works sent to them. Here are the terms of use All I can find is the usual "contents of this site are copyrighted", but that's the site, not the papers submitted.
Kilroy was here!
0% of original code
How can you code so many security holes in 0 lines of code?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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?
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
I believe the author meant "panacea", not "placebo".
panacea, noun: a remedy for all ills or difficulties : CURE-ALL
(Definition plagiarized from Mirriam-Webster)
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
One thing I haven't seen anyone post about this is the problem of trying to detect cheaters in a very basic class.
For example, I'm taking an introductory programming course at the moment, and the lab exercises tend to be solvable in a few minutes with the rudimentary Java skills we've acquired. How many ways can there be to answer these simplistic questions? Won't there be a tremendous false positive rate from this sort of thing?
Just how many "implement an alarm clock class" answers can there really be?
--saint
Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted
If I ran a service like that, I'd be tempted to skim off some of the papers, say... 10%, and market them to students who need a "gauranteed A".
As for turnitin.com owning the paper, are you sure it's not a non-exclusive license? If it's a non-exclusive license to use, they are just protecting themselves. If it's an actual copyright transfer than I wouldn't stand for it. It would be interesting to see a bunch of warez-swapping, MP3 trading students standing up for IP protection. It doesn't feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot, does it? I mean, after all, it's not like you lose any money by letting turnitin.com have the paper. How many students sell their papers anyway? Yada, yada, yada, all the same old AIP arguments turned on their head...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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?
Of course the site is /.ed, so I can't get on and read their terms of service myself, but do they say they keep a copy of the paper, or that they own the paper (or something along those lines)? If all they say is that they keep a copy of the paper, that in no way changes the copyright or ownership of the paper. It doesn't give them the right to reproduce or distribute it in any way. Basically, they are saying they are keeping a copy of the paper to add to their database, in case someone copies this paper in the future. If they claim ownership or copyright of the paper, then there is a problem.
It similar to you giving someone a copy of a picture you took. They now own that copy, and can keep it, but it in no way gives them the right to reproduce it or do anything else with it, as they don't hold the copyright on it.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
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.
If they get a "false positive," they can compare the original paper with the one that came up as the source material. It should be obvious at the point if there's plaigarism, at least no less obvious than it would be before this service existed. If the department involved doesn't have a process in place to verify plaigarism by looking at the source text, that's a problem, but that's a problem with the department's policies, not the service.
I see absolutely no problem with this, and so far no one has cited the dreaded property clause, either. This looks like a fine service.
I teach at a US university, and I am quite sure that an instructor has the right to keep a copy of everything that is turned in by the students as a part of coursework. Nobody freaks out about this, nor thinks their rights are being violated. It is also my right to consult with my colleagues regarding an assignment that is turned in to me. This pagiarism service does nothing more than what has been going on legally, though on a much smaller scale, at out universities.
Oh, and about worries whether these online services might falsely accuse someone of plagiarism, only total ignorance of how this works could give rise to such an objection. It's not like they send you email saying "your plagiarism test came out positive, congratulations". What they do is send you references to all of the original sources which share identical sections of text with the paper being investigated. Then I, the instructor, must decide whether the overlap between the paper and the other source is a symptom of plagiarism or of something else.
I have collegues who send every paper they receive to these services, and they catch many cheaters. Because I don't do this I might have missed some (but I like to think my assignments are so specific to my course that anything which is a cut and paste from the internet will not look like an answer to my essay question). However, when I get a paper I am suspicious about, I quickly OCR it and send it to plagiarism.org. They do five free checks per email address, and then charge you $1 for every additional check, which my department would pay if I wanted them to. It's great to call a cheating bastard into my office hour when you have absolute proof they cheated. I tell them I suspect plagiarism, and give them a chance to withdraw their paper (most of my colleagues are not this kind). So far, only one has refused. When she did I quoted to her a long passage from a website, which was identical to a section of her paper. Then I asked her to not return to my class. She got an F and the fact that she broke the law was appended to her permament university record. In this case I was very happy that finding incontrovertible proof was so little work for me, because I have better stuff to do than to search around for original sources. If it weren't for the website, I still would have known that she cheated; a couple of probing questions about the text she turned would reveal that. Still, I might feel torn about the F and the permanent black mark, because there are some people who can write stuff they can't explain verbally. With proof, though, I didn't need to feel torn at all.
Not to mention that the student's work is now being used without approval by a site in a manner that the student might not approve of. I for one don't want someone else using my work for gain without my permission. This is not personal use, this is a site for gain.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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:
You make it sound like it's the prime priority of a university to protect its reputation. Why would you think that? I think it's the prime priority of a university to educate its students. If they coast through by cheating, they're not taking the time to have their own thoughts, and when that happens, we fail as educators.
I guess the poster/editors felt that they couldn't use the word twice in one day. /. readers brains hurt.
Too many SAT words make
If a student submits a paper that was copied illegally, the student was never the rightful owner. How can turnitin.com now claim ownership?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com.
They can't do that. It's not legal. It doesn't follow the proper protocols for copyright assignment. They don't receive full copyright to you work just because they say so somewhere in a hidden license annoucement.
To transfer copyright you must *explicitly* do so in a manner involving consideration, signatures, etc.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
... but when it's back up I had better find a way to see if any of my work is being used on their site. I will then tell them to either remove it or start paying me. I'm not to thrilled that they are using MY work to make a profit.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
woof.
Yeah, go on and mod it as Off-Topic. It's a Karma-cap perk (or perq[uisite], if you wish). I left the +1 Score because I agree with the parent -- I'm sick of all these hackneyed phrases, too. They seem to be about 50% of the content of any student paper I've ever had the displeasure of reading, so now I'm back on-topic and Insightful, as well. Even more Insightful when you consider that the use of the same tired phrases, jargon and pseudo-English business-speak will result in a lot of positive results for "plagiarism". I'm guessing they're using some simple heuristics to defeat bad spelling, and if that ain't Interesting, what is? (I mean besides shoving a cheap hub up a stuffed animal's ass.)
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.
Wow, this is the same school board that mandated the teaching of Creationism. I say that once we finish off the Taliban, we go hunt down the Kansas school board!
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.
The problem is for Student Three, who comes along after Two's been fired. "Oh, another one of those University Zero grads, eh? Round file for that resume!"
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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.
So, they plan to search through every single chain of text for every single document in their database for every check?
I don't really think that's going to scale very well, unless they use some shortcut that cuts out a lot of the useful data.
For example the phrase "I enjoy Nintendo" has the following chains: "I", "I enjoy", "enjoy Nintendo" and "I enjoy Nintendo."... I suppose you could set a cap on the size of a chain (a large chain would have a small chain base). But still, that's a hell of a lot of data processing. I'm not sure they could honestly do it if they had a DB of say, a million documents.
And as far as these guys turning around and making a profit of this type of thing, well, I don't really think a teacher has the legal authority to turn over documents like that, they don't own the copyright to begin with.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Shakespeare and Bach would never have made it. Not only did they, and most,if not all, of their contemporaries borrow heavily from the works of others, they frequently 'stole' from themselves. Artists, with few or no exceptions, spend their formative years painstakingly 'plagiarising' the works of the masters. Yet now we have become obsessed not only with copyright but with novelty. To what end?
Bertrand Russell spoke to assuming the mind of another in order to understand their work. Becoming another through their work to the point of inadvertantly plagairising isn't a bad thing and is as much a valid learning experience as the deft copy and paste job of a blatant theft.;-) Who's to say that the Forest Bueller's of academica are not the better students.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
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"...
1. We respect all of your comments. We stand behind the free flow of information.
2. Turnitin was created by educators to solve an important problem in academia: intellectual property theft (see #10, below). .
3. The technology was developed at U.C. Berkeley as a tool to allow students to Peer Review each others' manuscripts (see BARRIE, J.M. AND PRESTI, D.E. The WWW as an instructional tool. Science, 274(5286): 371-372, 1996.). The original idea concerned collaborative learning. .
4. Turnitin should only be used as a deterrent to plagiarism and not as a tool to catch cheaters (in fact, I believe the latter to be a misuse of our technology). .
5. Turnitin only 'sources-out' a manuscript. It does not determine whether or not a paper was actually plagiarized; that is left to the faculty member. .
6. Turnitin helps an instructor to insure that their students are all playing by the same set of rules (not unlike a football or basketball referee). It levels the playing field. .
7. Technology similar to Turnitin has been used in computer science departments (whether you know it or not) for over a decade. .
8. All work submitted to Turnitin remains the property of the author. .
9. According to the Fair Use clause of the US Copyright Act, Turnitin makes a transformative use (and therefore Fair Use) use of the original work which does not violate the intellectual property rights of the author. .
10. Final thought, "A person's published words are the product of a great deal of training, thought, and effort. To represent another's thoughts as one's own is at best misrepresentation. Plagiarism is a substitute for writing, and so a substitute for thinking. At worst, it is theft of intellectual property, and therefore represents a serious challenge to the integrity of academia" - Dr. Michael M. Todd.
We respect the ideas and concerns discussed in this Slashdot thread.
Also call me critical, but the Copyright Act since 1976 has provided that a copyright attaches AUTOMATICALLY when a work is fixed in a medium, regardless of whether a copyright notice is affixed. If this company is keeping copies of papers submitted by professors for use in their future searches, IMHLO (L = Legal) they have created a derivative work in violation of the student's copyright. The Professor's submitting to the site is an act of contributory infringement. Can anyone say "class action lawsuit" ?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Actually, she didn't resign rather than change the grades. The school board overturned her grades rather than make her do it.
She resigned shortly after she went into the class and the 28 students basically taunted her, saying that they didn't have to do anything she said. So I guess they learned something after all. (I have the article hanging in my cubicle, but I'm at home right now.)
And these same people are no doubt baffled by how Enron could ever have happened.
gm
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
I don't think you're totally wrong, however I know for a fact that you're not entirely right either ;) For instance your thesis paper for a doctorate is your property and most schools require you to copyright it officially. Regardless of their policies, I never signed away my rights to my work at school and I would go to court over any of my work that they published without my knowledge in a heartbeat. I paid them to teach me (actually I paid them to give me a diploma) and they have no right to make money off of the work I did while I attended. I have issues with the educational system as is, I don't need this additional problem to get pissed about ;)
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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.
As for the moderators to this post, you should be able to recognize someone puffing up his/her ego by sacrificing accuracy. It certainly does not warrant the scores I'm seeing.
For those who actually want to learn more about copyrights, fair use, and how they apply to you, start your research at the Stanford Fair Use website. The next logical step for US citizens would be to visit the US Library of Congress site on copyrights. Good luck!
assert(expired(knowledge));
Does the univerisity claim ownership of all work produced by a student?
If not, how can the univerisity assign the copyright of something that isn't theirs?
Its kind of like me going to a Disney movie and then giving the copyright to my friend because Disney showed it to me.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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."
All sigs are created equal.
...what they're doing. When I was a CS TA, we used to get some good laughs off the people who copied the work of someone else who obviously didn't know WTF was going on. You're right, there are not that many ways to implement something trivial like an alarm class correctly. But there are a fair number of creative ways to bungle it if you don't have a clue, and if two people blow it in exactly the same absurd way it tends to make the graders wonder if there might be a connection. A closer look might show that the programs are identical (whitespace, comments, etc.) EXCEPT for the variable names (I guess they figured that would be too obvious)...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
final projects of her 110 HS sophmore students. She found 28 had cheated on the project
If a quarter of her students managed to find and copy a paper from the internet, this suggests to me that 1) The question it's self was not very original, and was probably copied it's self. 2) That she used a third party Web site to mark the paper re-inforces this view. 3) She does not understand the difference between good research and plagarism.
Read this story... damn, she's busted! She worked for PBS and was a judge on the Pultizer Prize. [see above Drudge Rpt story]
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.