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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?
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.
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.
"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
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
...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.
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.
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!
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!
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 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.
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.
I too am an educator. I'm a senior (6th year) graduate student in Neuroscience at a major research university and have TA'ed or taught six courses. I've received the university's highest teaching prize for grad students, so I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do. Over the past few years, I've caught several serious plagiarists. I've sat on honor council hearings for accused plagiarists. I myself was TRIED for plagiarism in college (Turned out someone had actually plagiarized my physics lab stored on a public computer. This was a long time ago in a much more naive time of computer security).
We don't use turnitin.com. Unless it was decreed by an administrator, I would never choose to use turnitin.com. The very concept violates the notion of an honor system that most universities employ. Academic integrity ought to be assumed, unless explicitly demonstrated otherwise. To screen all work for dishonesty presumes a probability of guilt. And while that may in fact be the reality (that is, probably, someone did cheat) you can't run a classroom that way. At least not a classroom where you hope to teach by establishing rapport, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility. A policy of using any apparatus that presumes low behavior establishes the expectation of low behaviors, which in turn (you guessed it) elicits low behavior. Academic work then turns into a resentful exercise of doing the least you can get away with to please the initimidator, rather than rising to the intellectual challenge.
Arguments of pragmatism do not hold. That is because the efficacy of an education is as much about the educational atmosphere as it is about holding students to a standard of integrity.
Now, the parent of this post describes about the only enlightened use of turnitin I can imagine. That is, using the service to check students' ability to synthesize third party ideas. There have been a couple cases of plagiarism I have been involved in where outright cheating was not as evident as the students' inability to communicate established ideas in a novel way. Novices have a very hard time breaking away from the efficiently-turned phraseology in a text book or other source. Often, the exact wording just gets stuck with them. There just isn't (in their mind) a better way to say it. These cases would be, in my mind, false positives of the turnitin system.
Unfortunately, using a system like turnitin on a case by case basis (i.e. employing it when a particular paper is suspicious) has as many counterarguments as using it systematically. That is, the accused can argue that potentially there are many other cheaters...he/she is being singled out because of his/her paper raised suspicion and was "processed" while other students' work was not.
Trading freedom for security is a popular theme in today's society. Arguments for/against face recognition systems, public CCTV cams, wiretapping, DNA banking, etc. are all grounded in very real concerns about safety and liberty. I'm not going to paraphrase Franklin's overused observation on the matter, but in the academy, the sociological impact of such choices is immediate and weighty. Students have been learning and cheating at institutions for centuries. A new method to efficiently cull out the lawbreakers makes life easier for the overburdened educators, but I would seriously doubt it heralds a new generation of better educated students. And THAT is the ultimate responsibility of any school.