Slashdot Mirror
Student Fights University Over Plagiarism-Detector
(Maly) writes "CBC is reporting that MCGill University has lost a fight to have students first turn papers over to an anti-cheating website before handing them in to professors. The student refused to hand in three assignments to the service, received a zero on those assignments, then fought the ruling. The story doesn't have many specifics, such as the venue of the fight (court or some internal university tribunal), but it is an interesting case. As a recent graduate of the social sciences, I find that practice appalling. The student is right to refuse, as he gets no compensation from the service for making money off his original work (assuming it was original!!). Although I don't like the idea, and I'm glad I never went through it, I suppose its analogue would be mandatory drug tests in sports."
This tool looks like it benefits the student greatly. If plagarism is detected it looks like it returns that to the student not the professor. Don't /.ers realize that most plagarism is unintentional. I for one used to get all my papers read over by as many proofreaders as possible before turning them in. How is this different than having a TA do a preliminary review? /. :)
As for making money off your work, boy, thats what colledge is about. Get the sheepskin then we'll see what your ideas are worth. Otherwise, you might as well write for
I am a teacher... And you guys wouldn't believe how much stuff students just copy from the Internet, or from other students.
:-(
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).
Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive.
Innocent Until Proven Guilty?
- cnb
The article says that the reason why Rosenfeld didn't submit it was because he didn't like the 'innocent until proved guilty' idea. However, that was not it. Turnitin.com works by keeping all essays submitted into the database, to keep the database growing. Rosenberg was also protesting the idea that his orignal work will be helping a company (A US company, no less) get more money. This this equally as important in his protest