Slashdot Mirror
Students Protest Turnitin.com
StupidSexyFlanders writes "The Washington Post ran a story about students protesting their school's use of anti-plagiarism site Turnitin.com, which checks papers they've written against a database of 22 million other papers. From the article:
"Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights."
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
The students go to my high school. The school administration blatantly denied the accusations that it violates student rights on the school announcements system, and then these guys decided to get themselves on the local news.
They win in my book.
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I can see those students having a problem with that, after all it is your work and you don't really want others to keep hold of it while checking. It's like turning up to an airport, handing your mobile over for them to check it wasn't dangerous, and then them handing it back to you after copying your phone book and all of your messages off of it. The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
I think the problem here is that the company is permenantly keeping it, and I'd be pretty smarted about that as well, but then on the flip side of the coin for the company and the school, the more copies they have, the more likely (in their view) it is that they will catch those who for example, are using their older brothers essays to go through or using work taken from old pupils. It's a tough situation to gauge, but the students have a strong point on the IP there. That being said, why not just add Wikipedia to the database and catch 99.9% of students, heh. Juding from teachers I know, Wikipedia is the bane of their existance when it comes to schoolwork.
Business Voyeur
"Do you think Bany of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Pick any large group of people protesting about "protecting my rights."
Some will have the moral high ground. Others will be secretly, or not-so-secretly, violating other's rights.
It's just the nature of humanity and the law of statistics applied to large numbers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It does not even matter if they are the worst hypocryte of the world.
Their work. Their IP. It is so then protected and nobody can copy it without their agreement.
But now I bet that in the admission rules it will be written that "student give fully and eternally the right to the school to copy and dsitribute any essay they give back for a notation, for any usage. "
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It didn't say that at all. That's why they came up with this argument in the first place; they have a legal basis for it.
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"Two wrongs don't make a right!"
When I was in high school a few years ago, they began to make us submit our papers through this system, too. It would read through the document and produce a number based on the likelihood that you cheated. I once wrote a simple paper for an English class and it ranked it as having a 27% chance of copying or cheated. The system was definately buggy and false positives can do an awful lot of hurt to a student's credibility.
I would assume that student's work automatically becomes his/her IP. However rules and laws tend to "bend" a little at high school for some reason, so I'm not 100% sure.
Has precedent ever been set in a case involving a homework as IP?
Does a student work become school property or is some right ceded to the school (say, the right to publish or the like)? Is there a lawyer in the room?
No sig
The pot calling the kettle black. What else is new?
Well, if the school wants to enforce the IP rules, then they have to abide by them as well.
Can't have it both ways. Tough. What's good for one is good for the other.
I think they should only submit (and hence keep) the papers that got a B or better. After all, if kids are dumb enough to plagarize C (or worse) papers, let them.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Whether you believe their motives to be more effective cheating or true IP rights concerns they certainly have the right to fight against this.
Quite frankly I can't see many students who are actively cheating being proactive enough to protest such a situation.
Keep in mind that a large group, like a student committee or slashdot, the group can be vocal oppontents and vocal proponents of intellectual property in different cases without any individual actually contradicting themselves. But taking that into account, I'll be there are still a huge number of copyright violators who would be outraged if their own copyright was violated. I find that kind of double standard pretty lame and disappointingly common. And it's one of the many reasons that we haven't been able to get reasonable copyright limits in place... because so many people want infinite protection for their own ideas even though it's obvious that society functions better with a less restricted idea flow.
At the moment I don't have anything popular enough to make a point with, but the creative projects
I have worked on I've made freely available. I'd like to think that if I ever had a big hit song or movie that I'd release it into the public domain after a few years, maybe 14 like the founders allowed. Maybe sooner if I could do so financially.
Cheers.
Let me preface this by saying that I don't know the full extent of IP law. But I am a teacher (college, not high school), and I can tell you that the vast majority of my students don't know, much less care about, their IP. My guess is, one or two students heard of the term and spread the word about it to the rest. And this would be fine, if they hadn't (in my opinion) misrepresented it. Their works are being submitted to help protect the IP rights of others as well as themselves. You have to apply for a patent, which is checked against other patents, before the right to that knowledge becomes yours. Same for a copyright, if I understand. And the software manufacturer isn't profiting off of your IP itself, just a way to check it against the IP of others. Just my thoughts, of course.
This will only make schools (if they don't already) make students sign waivers that grants them (and associates) the ability to retain a copy of their work for the purpose of detecting cheating. Can this group not see that it's in their interest academically to root out cheating so that everyone is forced to work and learn if they want to pass?
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
What kind of shit-ass stupid post is this?
1. Of course people download copyrighted material from the internet. Most material on the internet is copyrighted, but by placing
on the internet, people are extending to me the right to read it.
2. This company is storing students' papers in their database and using them without permission. This is a completely different situation.
They have such a developed system in place for keeping those terrible "plagiarizing" students. What about the teachers? Do they care when a teacher uses a copyrighted image they downloaded in a lesson? Or uncredited material for their lessons?
Lets scan the teaching material into a database and see what qualifies as plagiarism, and fire any teachers guilty. Surly the teachers should be held to the same standard, if not a -higher- standard than the students, so they should have no problem with this. Or maybe not...
The chances of false positives go up exponentially given a large enough population and small enough topic area.
> "Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted
> material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
That's an awful comment, for it assumes those objecting are those plagiarizing.
As another early member of the don't turn it in movement and friend of most of the main proponents of the movement, I want to emphasize the fact that the students really behind this are not cheaters. News of the mandatory use of turn it in came as a slap in the face to me, the policy of treating all students as cheaters just makes the cheaters find a way around the system but those with integrity are the ones who truly fight for change.
Many others will classify the movement as just your average rebelling against the man and while this movement obviously attracts those known for this, it is unfair to calssify the movement in that way. I'll try to dig up the ltter to the editor of our school paper that started it all. When reading it, one doesn't see it as a bratty teenage rebellion, but rather the concepts evoked in it make it sound truly Jeffersonian.
-Matthew Boehm
Last year, four guys and myself had to write a paper and present it. We figured the best way was for everyone to write a section. Now, when submitting it to a similar service (one in Sweden), the paper came back four times as plagiarism. Guess what? The same guy continued submiting copyrighted stuff, hoping that the database wouldn't contain every paper under the sun.
Res publica non dominetur
At my University, it was made pretty clear in several courses that homework assignments and other submitted course materials were property of the University. You can, of course, choose to keep your 'intellectual property', but then, good luck passing the course!
Titus Barik
Personally, I don't think it is. The company makes money and increases the abilities of its product by adding the works of individuals it has not compensated. Either give consideration for the IP (at least $1) or don't add it.
"And the software manufacturer isn't profiting off of your IP itself, just a way to check it against the IP of others"
See, the thing is, they are selling this service to other schools and institutions. The service they are selling relies on the IP, and as a result, they are making money off of IP which they acquired from students without their consent. That's the problem.
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it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?
Oh come on now. It's not really necessary to put a stupid question after each post. Obviously the fact that a sizable percentage are dishonest in no way suggests that there is not a single one who is not.
The main issue here seems to be that the company keeps assignments indefinitely. By the time that becomes an issue, cheaters have already been caught -- that is, if turnitin.com didn't save their assignments, it wouldn't help them cheat in any way unless a large number of other schools also started making the same demands (even then maybe not, as long as there was still a good enough sampling of fake papers from elsewhere). The only way I can see that the students could still be dishonest about this is if they were hoping to sell the assignment or in other ways enable cheating by other students. Maybe that's the motivation behind this group, but I kind of doubt it.
I am the man with no sig!
At least within a single institution this should fall within the FERPA rights of academic employees, even without student permission. As long as the information being archived, be it records, projects, papers, or whatever, relates to the academic success of the student, we can pass information among others within the academic dept. In other words, if I wanted to build such a database within the confines of my institution and allow all my fellow faculty to upload material to be cross-referenced with my own students' material then I could.
While it is annoying for people to be copying your work with you having no choice in the matter, it's even worse if they then are going to be using it to make money. If the company simply were to have massives servers full of students work that was just sitting there it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but they're making money off of it.
By saving every piece of work submitted they can say "Not only do we search for their work online, but we also have a collection of X billion submitted papers." This will attract new business and help the company to grow, the only problem is that it isn't the company themselves that's doing the work. Students are writing papers, being forced to submit them to the service, and that helps the service grow as a company, but they don't see a dime of the profits.
Not only that but we used it at my Highschool the last year I was there and it was terrible. My friend wrote a biography where he said "He was born in Newark." and it flagged him because another website had that same sentence. However if you went and took pages straight out of online databases (EBSCO Host and the like) it never caught you because it doesn't have access to that material. All in all a terrible system.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Irrelevant.
"There is a high likelyhood that you might do A, therefore we must assume you also do B."
This kind of tagline at the end of the post is unnecesary and silly. The fact that I go 10 miles per hour over the speed limit occasionally is no cause for my car to be impounded and searched for cocaine. Two wrongs never, ever, make a right. If someone is downloading an MP3 off the internet, it may be illegal, but it doesn't give a body of people the right to violate their privacy on a completely unrelated matter.
~Wx
sig?
"Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Statistically speaking, a portion of the American population are rapists. Do you think any of them should be concerned if every citizen got raped?
"Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Just don't forget that statistically speaking there are many students who don't download copyrighted material. Do you think they are concerned about IP rights? I think some of them are. Beyond being weak I think this IP augment is irrelevant. However, I do see a stronger argument that could be made over legal use issues. One could say that entering these articles into a database is similar to what search engines do with web pages. There is an important difference. Websites are designed with the understanding that everyone will be able to view them; however, papers aren't. My believe is that this plagiarism data base is a good intention, but crosses the fine line of fair use.
Hobby Robotics
So if the students put copyright notices on their work before they turn it into the school, and the school and Turnitin.com make copies, the students should ask the **AA lawyers to help them fight this piracy. They could make the claim that they are being taught piracy in school, which means it isn't their fault they are taking music.
What about the teachers? Do they care when a teacher uses a copyrighted image they downloaded in a lesson? Or uncredited material for their lessons?
Under fair use, copyrighted material can be used for educational purposes. If the teachers are trying to pass the work off as their own, or photocopying entire textbooks, then it's another matter.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
I see.
So we should only enforce the law when it is to the benefit of large corporations (Microsoft, IBM, Sony), politicians, media cartels (RIAA, MPAA, BPI) but not when the rights of individuals are infringed?
As others have pointed out, false positives can ruin an otherwise honest student's prospects. After all, the point-haired mindset doesn't just pervade middle management in corporations. It affects techers, law enforcers, politicians, government burocrats, journalists, slashdotters.
Oh look! A shiny computerised system! It must be right! I can't understand how it works, therefore it must be very clever and always right! All students (private citizens, civillians, voters, consumers) are fundamentally dishonest law-breakers and deserve my contempt.
Grrrr. Time for my daily drink and drugs coctail. Hand me my pills and whisky.
Stick Men
Technically, the students are correct. In writing the essay, they are automatically granted copyright, unless they state otherwise. Adding essays to this dadabase violates their copyright. You can't actually argue with this, because it's the law.
A solution is not hard to find. Students simply have to agree to have their essays added to this database, and if they don't agree to do so, you can take of points or just fail the kid altogether. Remember, High School isn't a democracy.
Personally, even as a High School student who also does a lot of outside writing (which I do copyright), I never hand anything into my school that has any value outside it's respective class. But I see where these people are coming from - your rights shouldn't be violated, whether or not you need them
Services like Turnitin aren't the magical bullet to the cheating problem. For starters, most students cheat off the internet, not each other. And this only accounts for one type of cheating - many students are starting to take notes from the internet as well, which is a problem with classes that grade you based on the quality of your notes. Trading answers over instant messengers is extremely common. And, 99% of the time, the students are never caught.
On an open notes quiz, one of my previous teachers noticed the same phrase used over and over; upon further investigation, that teacher found out that those students had copied the same Sparknotes pages into their notes and where using them for the quiz. And this was a 10th grade English "honors" class. So don't think that plagiarism is limited to the lower kids.
no one-EVER- looks at their financial statement- and says, I have enough....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Now, let's staple on a good ol' google search of the DB, let anyone use it freely, and voila! instant and accessible research for all!
Oh wait. These are high school papers, aren't they? And to think... it alsmost seemed like a good idea...
I'd love to have available as a 'Net service a site that identifies who said what, first. It can be time-consuming to track down all the George Carlin hoax material ...
It would also be interesting to come up with some sort of "fair use" score generator ... copying a full work without attribution would get a zero or less. It would take a pretty fancy algorithm to judge a skillful rewrite. ;-)
I can see the students' point, though. "Opt out," which they advocate, might be the way to go. Turnitin.com already has enough material to function as a deterrent. I don't think the students are suggesting that the schools have no right to compare current material to the DB ... it's the *adding* of material.
-jeff
If TurnItIn.com paid students a bounty for every match of a plagairized document against their "original" in the database, they'd stop complaining. If most students aren't cheaters, but the submitters charge for the education they're "enforcing" (or charge a fine to cheaters), then there should be money for the smaller fraction who are used for cheating.
This database is a lot like a registry of music performances, comparing against "cover" versions found in the wild. Except that the right to cover a song can't be bought, it's charged when discovered. The database is enforcing the intellectual property of the "original" authors, protecting them from plagiarism.
--
make install -not war
Let's face it . . . there is a MASSIVE business in selling papers to students. Many are lazy and don't feel like doing their own work, hence there's a large, viable market for such a gig. As an example, when I attended a very large state university and lived in off-campus housing, there was a very well-known (in the area) lady whose sole, full-time occupation was selling papers out of her house (we'd first thought she was a drug dealer with the amount of traffic going to / from the house at all hours of day and night).
As for protecting students' IP, why not store a unique hash of the paper (and possibly select excerpts) rather than the paper itself? I'm surprised that no one's yet done this.
A hypothetical: Freshman year, English 1001: Student writes a 7 page paper and develops a good idea that they try to remember. Junior year, Political Science 3001: Student no longer has a copy of their Freshman year paper, but still remembers, almost word for word, a key sentence or paragraph that they wrote years ago. They include this in their Political Science paper, submit to turnitin.com and are flagged as a plagarist . Turnitin.com does not tell them what paper it is they have plagarized, who wrote the original work (even though it happened to be them), nor does turnitin.com explain to the professor that the "plagarized" paragraph was originally written by the same student. How does the student get access to the supposed "orignal"? Furthermore, is it not possible that this system is based primarily on a "whoever turns it in first, is automatically the original author" type of system? Suppose someone writes a paper for their own pleasure, or even for an entry for some type of scholarship. Someone likes his paper so much that they make a copy and hold on to the paper. That someone has a class and is asked to write a very similar paper, maybe at a different school, and decides to plagarize the original author's paper and submits it to turnitin.com. However, because the original author had never submitted his paper to turnitin, turnitin now considers the plagarizer to be the "orignal author" of the paper. Fast forward to a few years later when the orignal author is in their senior year in college and decides to submit their paper for a class that is calling for him to write something over the exact topic he wrote about years ago. When he submits it to turnitin.com, he is labelled a plagarizer, and he has absolutely no recourse nor any way to clear his name.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
Do I want an employer to look at a paper I wrote about a controversial subject(totally unrelated to work) in freshman year? Honestly I think that if students knew that their paper was going to be shared with more than them and their English teacher I would object too. I think that I would have much less candor and thus learn much less both about the subject at hand as well as myself if I knew my paper was going to be recorded for many people to see for perpetuity. I also think it would hamper my skills as a writer.
I'm against cheating, but I think the solution is to make severe punishments. Kick the student out of school if they cheat. A lot of schools say they reserver the right to do so, but are so afraid of getting sued that they rarely ever do. I know people who got caught and just got a slap on the wrist. If students see little to no risk and lots of reward, they are going to cheat end of story.
Monstar L
Change the admission papers to force them to give permission for the school to use their work while in school for any comparative reason, takes care of that problem.
Getting rid of cheaters (expulsion with no refund) is the best thing that can happen.
Barring the potential IP issues, what happens to students who (legitimately) re-use portions of their own work, only to have it called out upon second use because it's already in the database. Seems pretty flawed. Do they cite original sources when they tag a new paper as being plagiarized?
This only works if the essay was submitted electronically. Wayyy back when I was in high school we could only submit the essays in paper form, preferrably typed (but they did allow us to write it out in neat hand writing). Does this high school require that people submit their essays in electronic form? I would think that if you submitted all your work on paper then you'd at least force the teachers to scan the document before submitting it (making it that much more work). Or if you submitted it handwritten, there's no way they would sit there and type it in to submit it to a website.
Of course, if you're actually going to go through the trouble of writing it out by hand, you're probably not plagiarizing either. But at least it would help to protect your IP.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
While no document is signed to the fact, couldn't one argue that the papers are considered IP of the college since they were written at the behest of the college (professor)? Most work places take control if IP developed using their tools or during their time, which is sometimes taken back in court by the creator (to the point that some explicitely state "work for us, we own your IP").
Not that I necessarily disagree with these students; if I write something insightful during my college career, I would like to use it again later on, and not have it diluted from being searchable or potentially copied from that database.
Still, I can't help but think that they might have an ulterier motive..
a sizable percentage of these
Wrong, wrong, wrong ! It always raises my blood pressure above the skies when I see [regarding any topic] that the analysts/writers/etc. start by saying most of the people are criminals anyway so it doesn't matter. Stupid and outrageous assumption. Why couldn't a student raise his/her voice when (s)he feels _any_ of his/her rights might be violated or just simply not taken into consideration ? Why should anybody feel like living in a goddamn' prison ?
No, I'm not a student who'd be related to these events, nor do I know anyone who is.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
IMHO, I don't think that is the issue and I would guess that those screaming know their peers abuse the system - the reasoning behind this. What the problem is, is that this is yet another example of "Guilty, before proven inocent..."
Wouldn't teachers using this service be committing copyright infringement?
If the answer to a question is 42, and more than 1 student turns it in, is it plagiarism? I don't think so.
If a question asks one to explain the effect of X on B and many students give the same explanation is it violation of copyrights? I don't think so.
A question is asked and a truly innovative answer is given, perhaps worthy of a patent. And that worthy answer is used in a way that in no way involved the IP contained in the answer, is that IP violation? I don't see how it could be remotely considered so.
The people objected to this are the people who are cheating. IP rights has nothing to do with.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Lets face it; students just like to have something to protest about.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
A few years back I was a teaching assistant in a class that used turnitin.com for one semester as a test. We told the students they had to upload their final lab reports both to us and submit it to turnitin.com. We also did a survey of the students at the end of the semester to gauge reactions. This was a university-level science lab course, with long lab reports.
The result? Well we stopped using turnitin after that one-semester test. Basically the help it provided was seen as being very minimal. The administration quickly saw that the extra effort and money required to use the service was not being returned in useful product.
The student reaction was surprisingly neutral, mind you. They did dislike being "treated like criminals" but overall they were not too concerned about IP rights or privacy rights or anything. They just dutifully used the service and didn't really care. However I rather doubt that it helped combat plagiarism.
At the end of the day it wasn't worth using it. Having a teacher actually read the material (which they will have to do anyway to grade it) is a much more effective way to catch plagiarism. What students may not realize is that teachers can nearly always pick out sentences that don't sound right or sound like they were written by someone else. Also, in this course we have mini-oral exams to test student knowledge. In practice it only takes a few minutes to orally assess a student's knowledge. If their understanding of the material greatly deviates from their lab report, it quickly becomes obvious and appropriate action can be taken.
The fact that turnitin blatantly violated the student's copyright is also true. They were never asked to sign any releases nor was it explained to them what would happen to the work they hand it. Overall I think turnitin.com is a failed idea: it is an attempt to use technology to solve a problem that the teachers are better at solving. Like I said: the teachers have to read and grade any work anyways... so let them detect plagiarism the old fashioned way.
the content of students' papers has real monetary value. Not only from the point of view of being the foundation supporting the database company as well as the university, but also in the area of Patent Law, where such a huge database facilitates discovery of prior art. The issues are huge and the students' rights need to be addressed here!
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
I guess the question comes in "if you turn a paper in for grades is it now the property of the school/prof?" much the same as email/mail/faxes.
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot. Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?
So if everyone ignores IP laws, it shouldn't be a law anymore? Just like how everyone's drinking and smoking under the legal age, so we should get rid of that too, etc etc? People are hypocrites when it comes to laws. That's why we have courts. I direct your attention to the RIAA: People download music, and they get in trouble. I don't think that makes Turnitin exempt in any way. In fact, I'd almost say it's worse; Turnitin's profiting off the non-granted IP. If someone started downloading songs off torrents and then started selling them online, someone'd come down on them like a ton of bricks (ring a bell, anyone)?
Disclaimer: Yes, infringing IP is not good. But two wrongs don't make it right.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
Keep in mind that a large group, like a student committee or slashdot, the group can be vocal oppontents and vocal proponents of intellectual property in different cases without any individual actually contradicting themselves. But taking that into account, I'll be there are still a huge number of copyright violators who would be outraged if their own copyright was violated. I find that kind of double standard pretty lame and disappointingly common. And it's one of the many reasons that we haven't been able to get reasonable copyright limits in place... because so many people want infinite protection for their own ideas even though it's obvious that society functions better with a less restricted idea flow.
At the moment I don't have anything popular enough to make a point with, but the creative projects I have worked on I've made freely available. I'd like to think that if I ever had a big hit song or movie that I'd release it into the public domain after a few years, maybe 14 like the founders allowed. Maybe sooner if I could do so financially.
Cheers.
Ok, so they check it against a database comprised of 22 *million* (and counting) papers plus "online sources and electronic archives of journals". We're not talking about graduate students working on their PhDs and whatnot, not even college level papers, we're talking about relatively trivial subjects on High School papers.
;) Think MySpace/Other-Personal-Pages-Service and the preemptive screening of such public material on the part of would-be employers. After all, we've all done them at one time or another.. And this is just one example I can think of.
When it's becoming increasingly difficult for one to come up with a truly original way to express an opinion which is most likely shared (and has been written down before) by many of one's peers, even when on very specific subjects, out of the General Public's "reach", not to mention to actually come up with something altogether new, I would assume that for your typical High School English Lit. report, which thousands of others are also writing, and millions have done before, it would be nearly impossible to write something that couldn't always, somehow, be construed as plagiarism.
So exactly what constitutes plagiarism? Direct, uncredited, quote from some source posing as your own thoughts? Yes that would be correct, I suppose, but only if you did it *willfully*. And with such an extensive database it's not that impossible to unwillingly write an entire paragraph 'ipsis verbis' to some previous paper. It seems to me a bit like the mess we've got with the software patents and how it's basically impossible for any developer to know whether the code they're writing is infringing a patent. And anyway, how many words are we talking here? How many consecutive verbatim words constitute plagiarism? A whole chapter, a paragraph, 20+ words, a phrase? 'Cause it can't possibly be the general gist of even a small part of a paper.
Does rewriting a paper you found in your own words also count? Again, when your writing a paper on something so widely discussed as 'Othello' (to use TFA's example), you are bound to write something that is nearly copy/paste to many previous papers, no matter how much of your own 'original' input you put in (pun unintended). It might just be me, but I see a huge false-positives potential here.
TFA puts forth the notion that some advocate this as a way to make students more aware that they need to give credit to the sources they use. I obviously agree with this, and I agree that when a teacher is trying to grade a student on a certain subject, and his/her ability to convey and support his/her opinion, he/she (the teacher) should be able to do exactly that, and not end up *just* grading that student's ability to use a search engine or the resources found at your local library. But at High School level I would assume that said teacher would be at least mildly aware of each student's writing skills/techniques as well as the "maximum expected level" of perfomance on that task (ie, writing the paper). And this, much more than a completely automated (read, blind) process, should be the way to sniff out plagiaristic practises. You don't get Lit. Nobel-level material from 100-word-vocabulary students.
I get the IP angle, I see the point and somewhat agree with it, but more importantly, I see a privacy issue. Handing a paper to your teacher is one thing. To have it inserted in a database without your written consent is altogether different. Do we really need shoddy papers we've written in High School to come back and bite us in the ass later on in life?
All in all, the idea has its merits, but I suppose that if it worked all that well, we'd have a similar system in place for pattent-checking (a whole lot more bucks to be made there, after all).
Anyway, just my two cents.
Insert non-printing characters into words. Use non-standard (but still acceptable) spelling whenever possible (alternate color and colour, aluminum and aluminium, etc.)
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Infringing on copyright for personnal use (eg copying music) is quite different from infringing on copyright for your for-profit business.
Since these papers are sent to TurnItIn digitally, there may be a DMCA case here.
The California State University [23 campuses, 400K students] has a interesting way to deal with this; they request that instructors use the following boilerplate written by the CSU general counsel:
The "substantiation" usually involves requiring students to photocopy the source of every quote or borrowed concept and attaching that photocopy to the student's paper. Miss one and you fail. The faculty then pull sections from the students papers and looks for hits at Google. "Problem" solved.
There were a couple times that I turned in old papers for a different class, or modified old papers that I wrote and submited the modified versions to the teacher/prof. It was my work, so plagerism was not a concern. However, if my schools used this system, I would have been accused of plagerizing my own work and wouldn't have any way or proving I used my own work, unless the original papers at turnitin.com retain information on the original authors and allow the teacher access to that data. The possibility of that situation combined with the fact that they are using my work to make money, without compensating me, makes me strongly disagree with the use of this service.
Besides, the school does own the works you do for them, the papers you turn in, etc. I really don't know by what means they do get it though.
Uhm... no.
You write it. It is yours. Schools do not have the right to republish your works until you give them that permission. It could easily be argued that sending your essays and whatnot to turnitin.com, the school is copying your work, and therefore violating copyright law.
I don't know how that argument would fly in court, as I am neither a lawyer nor a pilot.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I am OK with others looking at content that I have put up online. However, if a company starts to make money off my work by bypassing my web-site (storing the content in a data-base) then they better value my IP rights and pay up.
Re-use even of one's own previous work, is also academic dishonesty and in the same category as plagarism. You cannot submit a paper written for one class as fulfillment for an assignment in another class.
You *can* quote/cite reasonable portions of it in a new paper, but that is no different than citing someone else's work in a citation. Citations need to be clearly delimited and referenced, and obviously are outside of the purvey of turnitin.com's checking process.
I can somewhat understand why the studenst are upset. I personally would not have a problem with a site checking my paper to make sure it was not just copied from someone else, but I do feel somewhat cheated by being required to let an internet site keep my paper and more thatn likely not give me any recognition. I think that before the class starts students should either have to agree or disagree to have their papers stored in the database, but they should be required to have their papers checked against those already in the system.
As someone who has taught a year of high school and five years of college, my additude is that if the teacher is too lazy to check up on their suspicious students, then the they really aren't that concerned about their student's quality of work anyway.
It is really easy to make assignments specific to a class so that plagiarism is difficult.
Additionally, most plagiarists are so lazy they simply cut and paste the first thing that comes up on google. I can't tell you how many times I've just typed in the title of a paper into Google and found it. When reading papers, there are also just phrases that sound suspicious and it doesn't take long to search for them either. Most papers I've found that were plagiarized were at best C papers any way.
If someone can plagiarize well enough not to make me suspicious or turn up in Google, then more power to them. I'd rather presume innocent untill proven guilty than presume guilty untill proven innocent which is what services like turnitin do.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I certainly would have. When I attended college, I put a tremendous amount of time and work into my papers. Right or wrong, it was incredibly frustrating to see someone who you knew didn't write their paper and still obtained the same grade as you (or better). We knew because some students would admit cheating over beers ("look how clever I was!"), others weren't aware of what they had written, while other papers were clearly well above the level of the previous performance of the particular student. Cheating especially impacted the other students when the class was curved. As much as I believe that learning is an individual responsibility and you get out what you put in, the fact of the situation is that grades do matter - especially if you're applying to scholarships (some of us need them to attend school, not just for ego) and some job (especially the competitive ones) do seriously take grades into account. I would have welcomed this service with open arms.
What kind of trouble would be made if a student turned in an assigment with a copyright notice appended, requiring explicit written permission for use or derivative works. Or, even beyond that, if the student wrote the paper far enough in advance to file the copyright officially and have it approved before submitting.
Can't they get checksums for each sentence of each essay and store those? Sure it won't be as accurate, but I think it will be good enough for people that copy complete essays.
I teach writing at a prominent college, and I don't like TurnItIn at all, for many of the reasons described above, but primarily because (1) using it indicates a profound distrust in one's students, and I don't want to send my students that message, and (2) TurnItIn is hypocritical, profiting by using other peoples' intellectual property and then criminalizing students for doing the same thing.
b ase-designed, http://cyberdash.com/plagiarism-detection-software -issues-gvsu, http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/2006/09/22/monument s/, and http://www.culturecat.net/node/1156.
A lot of my colleagues who teach college writing agree that TurnItIn is highly problematic, as well: check out the recent discussions at http://kairosnews.org/students-rebel-against-data
As a lawsuit it didn't make much sene to sue the baby so the lawyers went after the parents.
The parents turned to be a couple of utterly broke illiterate deaf mutes.
As such, it was determined that they could not have violated any verbal agreements.
The lawyers got no money but shouldn't have any trouble enforcing their gag orger.
The parents had no comment.
The baby said "mama" and the lawyers had him taken out and shot.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They should just place a copyright notice and a paragraph about needing explicit written permission to make a copy, electronic or otherwise, of the attached original work. When it gets submitted, get a lawyer and sue the hell out of them. If every student that objects does this, they will have to quickly change their policy. In fact, they probably wouldn't even need a lawyer just the threat of a few thousand lawsuits might be enough.
SIGFAULT
You *can* quote/cite reasonable portions of it in a new paper, but that is no different than citing someone else's work in a citation. Citations need to be clearly delimited and referenced, and obviously are outside of the purvey of turnitin.com's checking process.
Indeed, in addition to selling one's old papers, this re-use/re-submission issue is another reason for turnitin.com to keep papers "forever" so as to stop selling and resubmissions.
Plagiarists get lower grades, or fail their exams and coursework. This reduces the numbers passing, reducing the supply of graduates thereby increasing the value of your hard work and grades. Grades are like money, if everyone has a million dollars then a million dollars is worthless.
Deleted
At most major Universities your work is owned by them once produced, not you. You can, in theory, get in trouble for using parts of your own papers as they aren't yours, but belong to the school.
No. Do you think the vast majority even looked at the papers ever again after they turned them in? I certainly didn't - even the ones in my field. In fact, I've never even looked back at my thesis, arguably the most important and original paper I wrote while in college.
If the students were truly concerned about IP, they should welcome this service. From my understanding the point of IP is to encourage innovation and creativity by protecting the author. Seems to me that this service does exactly that.
1. Turnitin.com, however imperfect, deters cheating and so fulfills a social purpose.
2. Students get a free education, and whatever value their intellectual property may have is a very small down payment.
3. In exceptional cases, most teachers would allow students to opt out of the system, just as students can usually ask that scantron tests be hand-graded. A quick google search is probably more effective than turnitin.com anyway, at least insofar as copying from public sources is concerned.
4. We are competing in a global economy, which competition depends upon the quality and integrity of our educational system. Even if students' rights were somehow at risk here--and they are not--the rights of honest students and society as a whole are overriding.
That it's assumed education can be cheated means to me that education is shit in this world. Isn't it true that eventually the cheater will find he is stark naked at his parade? (To use a metaphor from the children's book.)
$_.=["a".."z"," "]->[rand 27] while !/just another perl hacker$/;
Not valid for paper you turn in, at least for the 4 university I once studied, or were part of the research personal.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Ah, but they do have value. If it didn't have value then TurnItIn wouldn't have any problem with not storing articles/papers submitted for plagerism testing. The service TurnItIn supplies is dependent on having those high school level papers.
I wouldn't want some company using my work without my permission -- even if it is just a school assignment -- any more than I'd want my peers using it without my permission. Once I turn in an assignment is it still mine? I don't know. I did exchange the assignment for a grade didn't I?
Every student should write "Copyright ©2006 by so-and-so, all rights reserved."
Yes, I know that under current law everything is automatically copyrighted in the U. S. (although I believe including a notice may make some difference overseas). But there's no harm at all in asserting that one know's ones' rights, it might give teachers pause, and it might ultimately make turnitin's legal situation clearer, by forcing them either to accept the submission copyright notice and all, or to remove it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
As more and more papters are submitted to the database, won't the probability of a match trend toward 100% ??
Let's start with the fact that they spit out more false positives than drug dogs and work our way down from there.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
This is why I majored in math. I wrote a grand total of 2 papers in my entire collegiate career.
But it doesnt fly:
Either its illegal for the students to break copyright, and then so it is for the school - or nobody cares, but you can't have one side allowed to do it while another isn't allowed.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
and let turnitin grade the papers for us?
I don't want my paper "analyzed" in any way by a machine. I have big enough problems with TA's who don't know what they're talking about, thank you very much.
In my CS&E course, quite a few of the students did assignments that were industry-sponsored. Depending on the industry, they could be under relatively strict non-disclosure rules. If services like this make students sign away their rights to enter an NDA then it will affect their ability to pick up sponsorships from a wide spectrum of industry.
IMHO, doing an industry-sponsored project isn't the best idea since you'll have to pander to their outcomes and not focus on work that shows the limit of your skills.
Institutions of higher learning need to get out of the business of using automated software to check for plagarism. If we've reached a point where it is impossible for a professor to grade each paper...if we've reach a system of education where a robot is the first line of defense against cheating, then we need to begin a reevaluation of the whole concept of "higher learning". A student attends a University to learn, not to attain a grade. It isn't plagarism that is the problem, it is the blind adherence to a failed incentive - the grade. Take the grades out of higher learning, reduce class sizes, and create a situation where the instructor and the instructed can develop a mutual relationship based on trust.
It is ironic that the idea of using a program to "sniff" plagarism was borne in an environment that prides itself on a strong Honor Code (the University of Virginia by the Physics department). An Honor Code exists not to emphasize the need for enforcement, but to encourage an atmosphere of trust. Plagarism sniffing robots are akin to placing closed circuit TV cameras in every classroom, you might catch some people cheating, but, in doing so, you've destroyed a sense of trust necessary for true learning.
------ Tim O'Brien
This might have been more convincing if you shared the figure so we would know the "statistic." (Or did you just make that up?) Is it 89%, or is 11% also pretty "sizable?"
Or were you concerned that you might be accused of plaigarizing someone's student piracy polling paper? ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It may be desirable for students to Creative Commons thier work, thereby explicly excercising copyright over the material as well as the ways it can be used. The Academic Commons project uses Creative Commons, and I would think that a progressive university would be in favor of this. A CC licnese that would prevent non-commercial use would prohibit websites like Turnitin.com from being able to use the material, but also prevent students from using the material without explicit attribution to the original author.
Teachers (and parents for that matter) have no right to take a student's paper and post it anywhere without permission. This is a clear infringment on copyright.
However I think it is likely that teachers, who generally know little about copyright law, will find ways to justify it. Teachers are some of the worst copyright offenders. School boards have justified copying textbooks because it was "cheaper" than buying them. Somehow they had little difficulty justifying paying for buses and teachers, but authors? It was ok to rip off authors and publishers. (The Ontario school board lost in court over this)
Is it any wonder the public doesn't respect copyright?
I'm not coming down on teachers... as a group they "borrow" freely from themselves too. If a teacher finds a work sheet that she likes her first inclination is to copy it. This saves her time.
Now, the Creative comons license and the GNU Free Documentation License cover generally what teachers in general want to do. The thing is that in the past teachers didn't pay much attention to these licenses. Publishers did - or rather the publishers' lawyers did. Then the licenses were ignored for the most part.
In the future people may have to pay attention. If all teachers were to strictly adhere to the licenses that works are published under, and if they feel inclined, simply refuse to use material published under unacceptable licenses, then the "problem" will probably go away rather quickly.
This being said, no one has the right to take a student's work and publish it anywhere. However it is likely that lower court judges will find otherwise and create some theory of law to justify this. What the supreme courts might decide is open to question.
About the only way students can fight this is to ban together and choose to not submit assignments unless copryright laws are observed. I would certainly encourage any student who feels so inclined to place the words "Copyright blah, 20xx, All Rights Reserved" on each and every assignment. If these copyrights are not observed I would further encourge said students to study law and to make their case either in a mock court or if necessary in a real court.
Of course, I'm not a student and had my kids suggested such a thing I, of course, would have backed them 100%.
Furthermore I in fact did back them 100% in this area. The kids did create some rather high profile and remarkable websites before they were out of Grade 12. Included in one of the websites was a complete book. They have asked me to not say anything about their work. I have to repect their rights. However it was published on the net for several years and what they did is protected by copyright legislation.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Can we mod that last statement in the submitter's comments Troll?
This in a nation that puts metal detectors at the entrances and now wants to be able to strip-search students?
"The land of the free"...what a pathetic joke you've become! Fucking prison camp is more like it.
You're using her as bait, Master!
How about requiring movie producers to submit their scripts, to make sure it's not the same old recycled plots and 70s tv shows, with a soundtrack filled with remakes of pop "classics" and thinly disguised rip-offs they hope the audience is too young to catch on to?
I don't care why you're posting AC
The worst part about all of this is that it defeats the honor system. In other words, rather than innocent until found guilty, students are seen as guilty until found innocent.
I would be very worried about false positives. Having written some papers for undergrad classes, they were not, by nature, requiring original thought -- that is, I think a lot of (undergrad) papers are simply about gathering information more than interpreting it -- so the 4-5 sources I've uses were likely used by the other 5000 students who did a paper on the same subject.
All in all, this is nasty business -- it's bad enough in the airport (I've never carried a bomb onto an airplane, nor ever plan to, but I'm still a bit on edge going through security) -- I think it has no place in acedemia.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
I've used older works of my own as a basis for new work. It'd be foolish not to. Just like we all build our code into reusable chunks so that when it's needed on the next project we can leverage the time already put into it.
I had an interesting conversation with this about one of the senior staff members in our electronics department. He was of the mindset that plagurism really didn't matter if you structure the question in such a way that it need to show understanding. As long as the request is sufficiently targetted that you can't wholesale copy another paper, then what's the real problem if you find a paragraph in another person's paper that fits perfectly with what you need. (although in those cases why not just cite it as a source).
Engineering may be unique because papers usually need to show a deep understanding, and a professor who knows and works with you should be able to quickly see if it's not your work.
I can see how it would be a much bigger problem in something like English Lit.
Day 1: Turnitin.com opens and receives X submissions. The lucky students who were among the first to submit their papers to turnitin's database receive low "probability of plagarism" for their papers and the results are sent to their professors. The professors' students, for the most part, are all considered to be doing honest work and the professors grade the papers according to the content and quality of their ideas. Day 1,000: Turnitin.com's database has swelled to 100 million. Any common turn-of-phrase, or figure of speech, inevitably causes at least a marginal bump in the "probability of plagarism". God help the student who comes up with a sentence (on their own, and honestly) that matches word-for-word a sentence in one of the other 100 million papers. Poof! Even though the student did not plagarize, the sentence is nearly identical to someone else's and their P.o.P. jumps up. Now... Imagine you are a professor. You receive 20 reports from turnitin.com on your students' papers. A student named Jimmy has a damn good paper, but his probability of plagarism is reported to be twice as high as that of your other students. The paper, without the probability of plagarism report, is deserving of a low 'A'. However, you can't overlook the fact that his probability of plagarism is twice that of the other students. You decide to give him a high 'B' instead -- just to be safe. Something significant has just happened: You have unwittingly made the "probability of plagarism" a key component in your grading. You have no guidelines for what magic # causes you to lower a student's grade and can't verbalize or codify this grading component for your students. Most importantly, once this becomes a component of your grading, turnitin.com's P.o.P. # on a student's paper should now become an important consideration for students. As professors try to explain the importance of a low POP to their students, the students will, in time, come to realize that it is just as important to keep this mystical # low. In the future, Jimmy will be less likely to write a paper over a topic that interests him greatly if he fears that too many other people are also interested in that topic, as well. He rationalizes that if there the more papers written on his topic, the greater chance that his POP # will go up. Although he is honest, he knows that honest people are constantly coming up with the same ideas and doesn't want to take a chance that he will write a paper that is "too similar" to another paper submitted by a kid in Rhode Island 3 years earlier. Look at the U.S. Patent system. People are always coming up with fantastic ideas, honestly, and then discover to their dismay that someone has already come up with the exact same idea. The larger the database grows, the greater the opportunity for one's POP to increase.
-- I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous
You pay for the opportunity to attend lectures, learn, and be graded. You pay for the opportunity to earn a degree. People also pay to take the CPA exam or to sit for the Bar - paying for the exam does not guarantee that one will pass. The same goes for college and high school.
Most information that students use to write papers are paid for by their university libraries. They use a browser to access the content, but the IP rights have been paid for by the university.
The statement: "Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students..." is patently false. First, because you aren't actually citing statistics. Second, because of the point made above. Third, educational settings have special provision within copyright law of fair use that actually allows for what would be considered plagarism in other circumstances because it is necessary to actually cite works and quote from them in academic writing.
It said my copyright notice was plaguerized!
Maybe these students aren't big believers in the ongoing intellectual property land grab. But if the university is going to come down on them every time they play a song in Winamp, every time they look at a textbook, etc, etc. - and then turn around and say "all your essay are belong to us" without the slightest notion of property rights, well, I'd be a little miffed as well.
Why is it not-ok when a student gives a copy of an mp3 to a friend, but perfectly ok for the university to give a copy of a student's essay to an outside contractor?
-Graham
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
"...it's likely that..." is not speaking statistically. Yes, I think that some of them really are concerned about IP rights. I also think it's likely that some of them don't even download copyrighted material off the internet illegally.
-Rich
What has become of this world? A world in which the greatest minds have discovered and researched new things 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.
This site agglomerates information in order to restrict usage of it (akin to the patent system)! There is something terribly wrong with this, not only with the process but the basic ethical framework behind it. It promotes an egotistical philosophy that states "This is something I found out! You better not use that for your own research, or else!" People should be honored for things they 'find out', but others shouldn't be restricted to not use their work to create something new. I know this isn't exactly what this site does, but it stands for that kind of thinking.
Plagiarism has always more or less been part of science and art. It simply depends on how many works you mix together to create something 'new' and 'innovative' that doesn't resemble any one previous work. Do you think Mozart had created such great works if he had to make sure his tunes weren't used before? He (and not only him) sometimes actually knowingly "copied" melodies that were well know at the time and embellished them. So, not everyone can be a Mozart or a Beethoven, but at least we shouldn't punish people for trying.
I do see the problem of people being trained to fullfill their assignments by not thinking of their own but copying other's works word for word (especially when copy-pasting as opposed to writing it by hand), but in that case I would see the fault in the assignments themselves - why not ask questions that promote creative thinking instead of copy-pasting? In addition, what's the big deal wiht copy-pasting anyway? The assignments' function is to make the student research and learn stuff, which will eventually be tested in the exams where copy-pasting isn't possible. So the really lazy buns will be filtered out anyway, no?
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Seriously... why waste your political wad on intellectual property concerns when you could bring focus to more important questions? For instance, will reusing one's own material (in a class where that's okay) result in false accusations? What about short essay/math/programming assignments that have a high chance of being identical over thousands of instance documents? And imagine the additional judicial/privacy concerns if one student is accused of cheating off another student at a different university.
turnitin.com seems like a good tool. Students might be better off making sure that tool is used correctly and justly then trying to argue it shouldn't be used at all.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
"Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?".
Let's see...
"Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of people who report crimes also break speed limits. Do you think any of them are concerned about the law then?".
Yes, it's what we call a non sequitur, and it's a logical fallacy. Bad, bad Taco.
I finally had to block them at the firewall level because their search bot didn't respect the robots.txt, even though it was posted on their site that it does.
And just what does their bot need to crawl images of my family reunion for?
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
...MPAA/RIAA-style. Sue them for copyright infringement of your work for 150,000$ in statutory damages (per work, multiply with X if you have X papers with them). It's nowhere near fair use (commercial, whole work, permanent, reduces the market for you providing a comparison service to your own IP), so unless they can find a way they have authorization from you the copyright holder (or that you have given up copyright), you're looking at a minimum of 750$/work. Also, for those that have been reading too many GPL settlements, removing your work from their database does not free them from liability.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Because only professors should be able to use the same material year after year after year.
They shouldn't be so worried about that list. That list simply protects the students who wrote the original papers in teh first place,however it is very possible to write a new, original composition with the same title as a previously written paper. If that happens that may incorrectly flag the student as a cheater even though they wrote an original paper. o.k. kill the list, it's a stupid idea...
What if we drafted a standard disclaimer that states something to the effect "I retain all intellectual property rights to this document and am submitting this document only to satisfy a requirement by my educational institution." ?
If everyone that has to use Turnitin (I do) inserted an identical statement like this at the end of each paper, would it screw up their analysis system? If all papers are marked as potentially containing plagiarized content, what value is the service?
And like copyright, which is limited in scope, copyright is limited in scope.
Demand a second database be built containing digital copies of every professor's textbooks. That way, students can download the entire textbook and verify that the professor hasn't plagiarized any material before they buy the book. If a prof wants to check student's papers on the student paper database, he must provide all his textbooks to the prof textbook database. ;-)
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Because no one dares to post the link to Turnitin.
"Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Would it be okay for me to steal from a criminal? After all, they weren't concerned about the law right then.
Fortunately, the law doesn't recognize this ridiculous idea of yours, and these students don't give up all their future rights by breaking the law themselves.
Back in high school my school shortly discussed using this system. My main concern of Turnitin was at a public high school there was no option to opt out of this system. When I write a paper for class there is an understanding that this paper is only to be read by the teacher and other teachers. Any time a teacher wanted to show the example to other classes or keep it for next year as an example I was always approached and asked. If my school uses Turnitin no one is asking me if they can use my paper. And as a student there is no option to refuse using this system, teachers submit the papers.
The problem is when something gets added to the database there is no way to remove it. If this company, Turnitin, is disolved there is nothing guaranteeing this database isn't going to be sold saying they have the rights to these papers.
"But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights.""
How much for that double stand in the window?
Hey, if its good enough for the NBA, NFL, etc for protecting their works then it should suffice for a student paper, right?
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
If they want to sell a tool that my works are improving, then they should pay me for my papers.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Yeah, that's a blatent pile of crap. *ANY* other time, it's a fools errand to do the same work twice. However, education is so twisted to the point of being backward that you get idiocy like this. If I write a procedure to manipulate a matrix in a certain way, and it took me 12 hours to develop, I'm am *definitely* going to reuse it whenever possible. To do otherwise would be a sign of mental defect, as far as I'm concerned.
What you're saying is that in a school, I should be required to waste my time repeating the same work that I'd done and that I'd already proven to understand, for the sake of some professor/teacher ego, so that they know that I was forced to spend xx additional hours of my life to make them happy. I'm sorry, but at this stage in my life, if I were to go back and take another class, and a professor attempted that kind of sanctimonious bullshit on me, they would be talking to my lawyer within that day.
My work is my work, and if I choose to reuse it in a similar situation, this not only demonstrates that I understood the assignment, but that I recognized that I had already done the assignment. It is a mark of intelligence to recognize this.
I know this will sound absurd - but I think the solution for any student who's educational institution uses this facility can resolve the issue of the copy of their work going into this database by simply copyrighting their work. Then if the turnitin.com people used their work there would be a basis for legal action.
Apparently, none of these students have read the IP policy at their school. At least at my University, anything you turn in for a grade becomes the property of the University. By turning it in, you have implicitly waived your intellectual property rights over it anyway. Granted, I don't think that's fair in the first place, but the simple fact is that many of the students don't have any rights to the papers to begin with.
is put in their class syllabus that all papers required by the instructor for the class below to the instructor. The instructor is requesting specific work (a paper) in accordance with a specific return (a grade). In which case, this is work on assignment, as it were and the assigner has all rights to the work done. Then they can publish these papers to turnitin all they want. However, this won't keep students from cheating. It will just make them better at it.
Wow. what an opinionated by line.
The entire problem with these systems is they represent a gross distrust of alot of innocent students. If 25% or thereabouts cheat, it means 75% do not. And that 75% are entirely entitled to be pissed off at there essays being kept in some stupid anti-student database.
I would of never dreamed of doing this shit to my students back in my university days.
Respect is a 2 way street. If you want to get it from your students, you got to respect them first, otherwise you simply dont deserve it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I call it NotOriginalMusic.com. Listeners will send me copies of any music they purchase. My sophisticated software will compare samples of each submitted song to all other submitted songs. It will detect incidents of unauthorized sampling, mixing, or outright duplication and inform the submitter, who can then return the CD so their money will not be supporting artists who steal others' work. My collection^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^b^bThe database will reside on my media player PC and mp3 player.
Yes, re-use is cheating. Fine.
But: re-use is not plagiarism. Cheating yes, plagiarism no.
Every speaker/writer has an idiolect, a set of habitual terms and turns-of-phrase sometimes referred to as a "linguistic fingerprint". In searching for plagiarism, you must investigate similarities in phraseology in order to show disputed authorship. However, when looking for reuse in two texts written by the same person, you must discount similarity in phraseology and look instead for larger units of copying -- overall arguement structure, thematic progression etc. If I were to write two essays on the same topic, I would fully expect to see a high number of sentences of 80%-90% similarity in th two.
The TurnItIn system is in my opinion critically flawed. If it does not generate false positives on two texts from the same author, then it can't be doing a thourough enough comparison when it has texts with different authors.
HAL, taking a break from an essay on forensic stylistics.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The policy wasn't widely known, and certainly wasn't publicized, but it was there. You might want to reread your school's policy.
Is this like double secret probation ?
Care to trot out a citation to this "unpublicized" policy? I am genuinely curious to see this.
It is annoying that students are going to be subjected to this. I am glad that none of my professors have required me to use Turn It In, because I would have refused. If professors or teachers feel they are incapable of detecting writing that isn't original, too bad.
I agree not to cheat, but don't ask me to prove it.
While turnitin.com has created a database of papers against which any papers may be compared, it also searches the internet for blocks of text. In fact, in every case I have seen it used, turnitin has never returned a result of copying another paper, but constantly catches people pulling material from the internet without citing.
That having been said, plagiarism seems to fall into two large non-exclusive categories. There are those that steal from items on the internet and scholarly articles without citing them, and those that directly take an assignment from another individual they know. In the former case, a large database is not very useful because a proper internet search algorithm should be able to catch the cheaters. In the later case a large database is not useful, because cheating is likely going to be confined to individuals that have and are taking a particular class with a particular recurring assignment. In this case a database may be useful, but need not be global for all teachers everywhere to see - just covering the past assignments for that particular class would be good enough. A third category (or subcategory of those that steal from others), those that purchase whole papers written for them, wouldn't benefit from a large database, because a custom paper wouldn't show up anywhere. It would only matter with a paper that is purchased and turned in by many individuals at different institutions, but it is hard to gauge how often this happens.
Ultimately a few things can decrease the need for the database side of Turnitin.com. Slightly change the assignments for each semester. Design assignments in such a way that they require active consideration and answering a question. You could also test students in the papers they turned in, so they actually have to have read them well, presumably while writing their own. Handwritten in-class assignments limit cheating.
Turnitin is going to turn right around, and under a different site name sell the same papers from their database sell to students. Its called working both sides of the fence, and arms dealers have been doing it since time began. Sell weapons and merchandice to both parties and profit as the conflaguration escalates. Total hypocracy.
Just like the Americans sold their inferior outdated weapons to the indians, and now a days dump it on third world countries, so to would Turnitin really be sticking it to students, because the papers are from their flagged database and would come back 100% positive.
The real truth of the matter, are that schools are prisons, they are setup to condition children at an early life to accept the prison mentality, and condition them they have no rights. This latest bill to allow strip searches in schools is just what they do in prisons, and if they gain ground on this outward, they are goin to expand it to allow strip searches on any government or public property or military base "to protect the welfare of the others in the area". Yes, some park ranger doesn't like your long haired looks, starts hassling you, and next thing you know is patting down your nads. They already treat you like a criminal on public property by forcing you to go through metal detectors, xray machines, and be under video surveliance, all for "your protection". To hell with that lie, there is no protection.
I teach my niece not to say the pledge of allegience, to think critically, and to fight authority. This Christmas she's getting a copy of Animal Farm and a bookbag with a big anarchy circle on it. And come November we're going down with SOA watch to protest the hell out of the School of Americas assassin training camp.
Mark my words, it is coming.
Turnitin.com will be on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.
Why?
They violate student's IP rights (copyright)
They profit from it.
They farm the web using bots and also add it to their database
Beyond the simple case with them going after students materials, they are essentially farming the entire web for material, then adding it to their database, then making a profit from it. I wonder if they are likewise obtaining content from the large media conglomerates (most likely).
I hope turnitin gets sued. I want to be a member of the class too, because they have things my school has submitted, and they have probably farmed my website too.
Statistically speaking you have probably at least once experimented with a controlled substance. Should you be jailed?
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Then perhaps all the people being sued for P2P violations should just use the argument that they are keeping the database for the purpose of check whether their 'students' are plagerizing RIAA's works.
"They're not preventing the student [artist] from enjoying any value that their essay might have"
Either, copying for non-profit use is ok or it is not. And in this case it is copying for for profit. This is so far over the line of illegal as to be astounding. As far as I know, there is no clause in copryright law that says "if it is a corporation doing the copying it is ok". The teachers are clearly redistributing copyrighted material.
the AOIS is rising.
The company should check it against the database, and then get rid of it, their database shouldn't be automatically updating with every paper that goes through it because eventually it will start catching out genuine work purely due to the amount of data that is being processed through it.
So...How are those Shakespearean monkeys working out for you?
It seemed at the time that turnitin was a very cocky, for profit operation that was trying to gather a huge database of work to sell to universities and investigation firms.
needless to say i have permanently blocked turnitin bot from all my servers
What if we tried this with Top 40 music?
Better yet, what if we tried this with EVERY NEWS ARTICLE BY REUTERS AND AP?
This system represents a level of automated comparison which is eventually
going to highlight a truth that very few people would like to admit:
That most "originality" isn't all that original.
I think if we're going to hold students to this bar, we should be holding
our "creative professionals" to a far higher bar. But does anyone have the
stomach for it?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Perhaps the student papers could be hashed or encrypted in some way, such that you can never read the original plaintext unless you have an essay with duplicate text that hashes to the same value. Theoretically, you can't ever extract the original, but if you have something that hashes to it, you can infer what it must have been. In principle, perhaps you could make it so that only the passages within the text that are duplicated in the essay can be extracted. The privacy of the original texts is maintained unless there is proof of plagiarism (and since the original texts aren't readable, you can't attribute it to a compromised database — the plagiarism must have happened in some other way.)
Of course, this is more complicated than just hashing the whole document; substring searches have to be possible at the very least, along with possibly routines for detecting simple word substitutions. But maybe some clever computer scientist can come up with an appropriate data structure and accompanying search algorithm.
Big deal. So get a parent's signature. The parent needs to sign when registering the child for school anyway.
Students are paid with a diploma.
And here is Parent's answer to that:
Parent just completely dismantled the only valid objection to the school's using Turnitin. That just leaves the other, uglier objection to the use of the service: Students want to be able to cheat, and contributing papers by proxy to the Turnitin service can frustrate cheaters. These kids should be ashamed of themselves for trying to frame this as an "intellectual property rights" issue when there has been no infringement on those rights to speak of, except in one specific way that constitutes cheating anyway.
In the absence of specific arrangements otherwise, the instructor won't grade it, F is automatically yours.
Obviously this site is charging universities for access, and they're using my work to earn their money. Where's my cut? I don't recall ever signing an agreement that their company could use my works for their own profit. Personally I think this calls for a class action lawsuit by all of us students who are wrongfully in their database.
They speak to copyright here.
So how difficult would it be for a turnitin employee to create a copy of the entire database for their own use?
The quik bw fx jumpëd ove he ày dg.
I don't know, if I recollect correctly, my CS program retained the right to use any code etc. produced as part of a class project for academic purposes. Would this count as an academic purpose if the school legally permits this company to retain papers in its databse? Schools typically also retain final-exam answersheets (we never get them back do we?) for a couple of years. I don't know whether they could use them or if they already do though.
It will be interesting to see how this thing turns out.
All this nonsense is completely missing the point. The point is to get a education that works for you. The academic bias of the educational establishment has led to the devastation of the vocational training classes and an overemphasis on college-prep education.
Not everyone 'needs' to go to college; not everyone needs an intellectual classical education. In fact most people don't. People need to learn skills that will allow them to get a good satisfying job. A job that pays enough to support a family (along with your partner's wages).
An educational system that sends more than 20% of its graduates to college to learn literature, history, Western Civ, etc... is failing its society. Educational systems should start training people to do what they want to do much earlier than they do now. If you want to be a game programmer then you should start learning graphic design and computer programming at ten years old. If you want to be a rock star then you should be able to study music, electronics, and fashion starting at ten. If you want to be a fireman then start learning chemistry, anatomy, and phys ed at an early age.
It doesn't matter to the people in vocational training if they plagerize from someone else; it only matters that they learn the material that they need to know. If they cut-and-paste it or copy it by hand from an encyclopedia, SO WHAT?!?
We don't need 20 million term papers about the symbiology found in the works of John Milton. We don't need 20 million people learning Foucault. We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels.
We don't need people who give a fuck about whether someone is copying someone else's term paper.
Come on, people, join the real world. The real world is changing. None of this stupid shit that seems so important now will make any difference twenty years from now. Pay attention to what's seriously important. The educational establishment (in any country) is no longer seriously important. [..and stop going in deep debt from paying for useless college tuition...]
You are so not getting the point of classwork. After it's graded, the final product of your work is usually irrelevant. The point is to make you go through the exercise of creating the final product, thereby gaining insight and practice into the underlying principles. As much as most students want to deny it, repetition is an important tool in learning. If you were weight training at a gym, you wouldn't object: "But I lifted those weights yesterday! It's a fools errand to lift them again today.". As the parent poster pointed out, in any given assignment the instructor may be fine with your taking advantage of your previous work, you just have to be honest that you are doing so.
The system may be poorly designed, but at least it's objective. Both my sister and I got in trouble (to the extent that I was kicked out of class on more than one occasion) repeatedly for writing good papers in high school, because the teachers did not believe that any student of theirs could have produced that quality of work. As an experiment, my sister later copied a paper verbatim from the internet and did not receive any guff for it from a teacher who had accused her of plagiarism when she wrote her own work.
Turnitin.com is not necessarily a good solution, but it at least addresses the problem in an objective way rather than making a subjective judgment of the form "this paper is simply too good for high school, so it therefore must be plagiarized."
"Students will normally own the copyright to the scholarly and creative publications they develop, including works fulfilling course requirements (term papers and projects), Senior Projects, and Masters Theses/Projects. Students retain copyright ownership as long as they are not paid for the work that results in the creation and do not receive extraordinary University resources in support of the work. Nonetheless, by enrolling at the University, the student grants the University a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to mark on, modify, publicize and retain the work as may be required by the faculty, department, or the University"
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
There are so many problems with this statement that I don't know quite where to begin. First, just because "statistically speaking" members of group A are of type B doesn't mean that individuals or people of some subgroup will be of type B. Statistically speaking, golfers are white. Does that mean that, as a golfer, Tiger Woods should not have his doctor check for medical conditions that are more likely to affect people of african descent? Statistically speaking, American women do worse than American men on math tests (and for the sake of argument, I don't care whether it is due entirely to social factors or not). If a man and a woman take a math test for an employer and the woman does better, should the man get the job because he was expected to have done better?
Even if the people complaining had downloaded copyrighted material from the internet, does that mean that they fall completely out of the jurisdiction of copyright law? Is this because they are hypocrites, or merely because two wrongs make a right? The people who actually plagiarized papers might have no moral ground to stand on when they don't want their (plagiarized) papers to be used by others, but to suggest that a student who wrote his own paper but downloaded a Metallica mp3 should have no legal rights is preposterous. If a GPL developer sued Microsoft over GPL violations, and if the developer had once downloaded an album or used DeCSS to help rip a DVD, would that mean that he should lose all rights to his program and that Microsoft should be allowed to use it as they see fit? Would those facts be at all germane to the case? If the lawyers brought up the subject, wouldn't you laugh at them?
The automated testing of papers for plagiarism is probably a good thing if it keeps teachers from wasting time doing it by hand and if it encourages students to do original work. Maybe having papers automatically entered into a database serves some common good. However, a commercial entity which sells this service shouldn't be ignoring the copyright of the students to make a profit off their work. Why should we condemn exploitation everywhere but here?
What might be possible is that you grant a license to the university that allows the university to do whatever it likes with your papers, but you still own the copyright.
Check out section 204 of the copuright code
Probably the university owns the physical copy of the paper that you turned in, but not the underlying copyrights.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Over time, wouldn't the scores gradually get worse (toward cheating)? Think about it, you're always going to have millions to tens of millions of students on the same topics at some point. While there are many permutations possible in the English language to express thoughts/analysis on these topics, you're going to end up with Bobby in New Hampshire who ended up writing virtually the same paper (especially with shorters papers) as Billy did two years prior in California. Bobby's going to get labeled a cheater and will truly have no recourse because his work to close to a prior work (though he had no knowledge of its existence).
I just fear a trend that seems like it's going to lead to students bringing lawyers with them to school.
My wife has a batchelors in criminal justice, and many of her papers were incredibly open-ended, like "Should incarceration be for rehabilitation or punishment. Discuss."
Her professors obviously didn't co-ordinate their assignments and there would be considerable overlap between topics and classes.
Compared to math assignments that ask you to find the optimal angle and maximum range for a 1kg projectile fired at 30 m/s, there is a distinct difference.
Interestingly, I have actually been accused of plagurism identified by one of these automated systems. In some entry level C programming class, they somehow flagged that my entry unacceptably matched that of another student. Despite the fact that before the accusation I was in the top 10% of the class and s/he was in the bottom 10%, they argued that they couldn't tell who copied who.
It was a very distressing experience. His entry didn't even compile, had obviously been typed into word (it had uppercase I as a loop variable) and was handed in two days late yet I had my grade pulled from an A to B (he stayed at F).
At the time the university did a piss-poor job of maintaining their printers. As so I think I sent the job to print, not realizing there was no paper, and then I couldn't remove it from the queue (because they had problems with students setting their jobs to high priority, the removed all access to lpq). He probably picked it up the following day when some admin restocked the printer.
In the end my parents moved to start legal action and they quickly caved and sent an official apology. I don't believe the department ever tried that again.
there is less chance the Census Bureau will be purchases by NewsCorp, and you find yourself being targetted for ads due to papers you have written, or of having your sophomoric essays on the wonders of Marx being turned over to your next employer for a reasonable fee.
Say for instance Turnitin is purchased, along with their database? They could develop quite detailed personality profiles on the users in their system, and sell them to the highest bidder.
Sure these things are currently prevented by their licensing agreements with schools, however large corporations routinely ignore the agreements they've made with educational institutions (see the example Blackboard, Inc. & Pearson Publication ignoring the agreements they made with the IMS Global Consortium, etc.) and there does not seem to be much in the way of federal oversight (nothing that a few million to the right CongressCritter couldn't stop).
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
No, I think you're not getting the point of education. If I already wrote the paper, then I already demonstrated the understanding. At that point, you move on and learn something new. Once I know how to add, making me do it again and again will help me remember it, but not help me understand adding any more than I already did.
Also, physical exercise is not that much like mental exercise. Your basic abilities are definitely aided through repitition. You mental ability to memorize, and types of mental manipulation can certainly be improved through a process similar to weight training. However, once I have learned something, I know it. Forcing me to write a paper on the American Civil War twice is not going to make me learn anything, other than that a professor or an academic policy needs to be changed. Again, writing that paper multiple times will not help me, unless your point is to improve penmanship/touch typing skill or to practice writing papers.
As for your weight training example, if the point was to learn how to lift a weight, then there is little to gain from lifting the weight fifty times past the point where I understood how it worked. If the point was to build muscle tone/mass, then there is point to lifting it the additional times. The point of a history class is not to teach me to write a paper, it is to teach me history. If I already know the bit of history, then it is certainly a waste to force me to hear it/write about it a few more times.
Most of the comments here are from folks who obviously have never used the system (UTFS: use the friendly software). I have, and in fact I'm currently in the process of getting on the black list of our Provost who is trying to stop using it at our school, presumably at the request of some wealthy alum whose coke-snorting little darling was caught plagiarizing by TurnItIn.
The most salient points are:
1. TurnItIn's overall score is the least interesting aspect: in fact a well-done paper with lots of [cited] sources will usually have a high score. TurnItIn identifies the exact text, and it is that pattern of useage (notably, is it properly attributed?) that is key. One of the most common plagiarism methods, in fact, is to quote a page or more of material, attribute some fraction of it, but then claim the rest was your own work. One has to look at the specific text to pick up this.
2. References to previously turned-in papers provide a link to the professor whose class that original paper was submitted from, not just some anonymous "we have this somewhere in our data base." Most of the various scenarios presented in these comments probably wouldn't happen at all, or at best are very, very unlikely.
3. At the college level at least much of the plagiarism comes from material that is on the web for perfectly legitimate reasons rather than from term paper mills. [To be sure, that's probably more the case in my field, international studies, than it would be for someone writing a paper on Moby Dick: "Like, there's this whale, see, and a guy named Ishmail..."] To take an actual case, a student was writing a paper on the expansion of the European Union, and about a third of the paper was taken (without attribution) from a report by some think-tank in Belgium (in English...).
4. TurnItIn has been challenged ever since its beginning on IP grounds, and it has won those cases. Keep in mind that copyright law has exceptions for educational use -- you can't just take your common sense notions of copyright as it applies to, say, Bob Dylan's lyrics and assume that translates directly into the educational domain. IANAL and don't know the details, but the fact that TurnItIn has won the challenges suggests (or rather, establishes) that the law is on it's side.
The group of individuals that TurnItIn really protects are the honest students, who in my experience are 90 - 95% in any given class (I rarely catch more than one or two students in a class of 50, and by the way, the proportion has been going down as use of TurnItIn has gone up). (The figures one sees about 60% - 80% of students cheating are self-reports of ever cheating, not the percentage who cheat all the time.) The web's advantages to students far, far out-weigh its disadvantages, but TurnItIn goes a long way in compensating for one of those major disadvantages
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
You should cite your prior paper.
I honestly believe your school is failing you if they are routinely having you rewrite stuff that you've already done.
The aspect that really annoys me about turnitin.com is that it'll complain if you submit a paper identical (or nearly so) to one you previously used. This is very unlike the real world, where re-using your own work is not plagiarism. In fact, programmers do it all the time. I do it for art, too. And I can remember at least three occasions in college where I could dust off a paper, make a few minor edits, and use it again.
I am curious, however - obviously turnitin.com contains encyclopedia entries and such in their database. Do they licence those? If so, papers submitted to it should be licenced in a similar manner. And they should keep track of ownership and exclude them in checking a paper submitted by the same person.
When i plagerized, all i had to do is some carful rewording, and check my essay through google to see if any phrases popped up in its search. Turnitin.com didn't catch any of the shit i copied.
I'm a physical sciences/mathematics student, so I use TeX for a lot of my typed work. It's quite difficult to plagiarize a lab report, which is usually the only type of long-form writing I do, so this issue has never really come up for me.
But last year, in a required biology class, of all disciplines, I was required to produce a stupid little 1-page paper in electronic format for submission to turnitin.com. I made sure to prepare it using TeX, but then for final output I used pdfTeX with all the bells and whistles: font expansion/contraction, character kerning, font encoding changes, etc.
I'd like to see what kind of mangled mess turnitin.com thought that poor paper was.
"We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels."
And you expect them to do this without alegbra or critical reading skills? Yes our education system is a sad mess, but the idea of a common broad-based education is still sound, both as a launching platform for later academic specialization and as a cultural common ground for our society.
We are all just people.
At work just the other day we had a all-employee meeting where large groups had to attend a lecture on Freedom of Information (FOI). One point the speaker made was even if something embarrassed you that didn't give you the right to hide or withold information someone asks for, unless it's of a personal nature. If you write it and it's public, expect it to be available to anyone who asks to see it.
When some of these students, lawyers or journalists, graduate I'm sure they'll be demanding access to information as part of their job. maybe even a student's essay.
This doesn't pass the laugh test, sorry. Any judge would dismiss this with prejudice. As the original poster stated, the student's ability to publish her own work for profit has been in no way diminished. That is exactly what copyright laws are intended to protect.
And sue for what, exactly? Certainly not money, because your case suffers from the same problem as the other students--you have not been harmed financially in any way. You might have even eyed Section 504(c) of the Code and gone "Oh wow, I can sue for statutory damages!" but you won't get them, I can tell you that right now. You might get 200 bucks and a slap on the back. The best you could hope for is the remedy that you yourself demanded. That is, to get a judge's order demanding that Turnitin remove your papers.
If that's worth your time and money, then I say do it. Otherwise, consider this: What would you deem more important, your meager copyright on a few papers that have made you no money at all, or preserving scholastic honesty in America's school systems? If you chose "my copyright" then congratulations, there might be a job waiting for you at the ACLU. If you chose academic integrity, then you would be the same boat as countless schools across the country.
Cheers.
But, a few days ago, I wrote a 1,000 word paper on human rights. My teacher checks every paper from his students against his database. Keep in mind, I did mine in a span of one or two hours, cited no sources... and it came up plagiarized. My completely original work, came up as 100% plagiarized. I'm hoping to get this sorted out, but.. the services from this website are useful, but its mistakes are disastrous. I stand to lose 20% of my grade because of this.
I believe that turnitin.com is using thier site to provide a peer to peer resource for papers and making a profit doing it.
From turnitin.com http://www.turnitin.com/paperPermission.asp
Because submitted papers remain the intellectual property of their
authors, instructors, and respective institutions, we are unable to
show you the content of this paper at this time.
If you would still like to view this paper, your instructor may be
able to request permission to view the paper from the instructor to
whom the paper was originally submitted.
As as student I have major issues with knowing that all a person has to do is receive permission from my instructor to receive a full original copy of my work, and turnitin.com makes money off of this service.
I have written several research papers on research that I have done on my own and find it sickening that others have access to my research work without my express consent.
I personally can't wait until a coding flaw on their website allows Google to crawl all of the papers ever submitted and everyone sees the true problem with keeping works that don't belong to you on the Internet.
If turnitin.com would like to change their policy to only scan and compare received works to copyrighted works and keep no copy of my original work I would support them. But the fact that it is my intellectual property gives me the right to choose who can and cannot use it for any reason. If I choose to sell my work to someone else that is my choice, just as it is to restrict anyone from using my work to make a profit.
I intend to test turnitin.com by submitting one of my already submitted works to their service and see what results I receive. I'm curious to find out if I am able to see any of my work, or am able to successfully obtain access to my work through the instructor posed as another instructor or student. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out that turnitin.com provides access to intellectual property without consent of the writer for a price?
Just a couple of cents
Which does not rule out the possibility of homeschooling, right?
The majority of students are not saints with respect to following US laws on intellectual property. However, no one that I know has ever violated violated someone's copyright in order to make money. If they did, I would think they deserve their fines or jailtime, even if I think current IP laws are less than perfect.
If they get any legal traction at all, which they won't, I'd suggest that schools explicitly reference Turnitin.com in their student handbook.
And with all this talk of intellectual property, where's the outrage that their work is being plagiarized? Why aren't they getting pissed off that papers are being presented as someone else's original work? In addition to flunking or suspending plagiarists, perhaps schools should inform the original paper's author, so he can get all RIAA on their asses.
This is not my sandwich.
The system is meant to protect non-cheating students. That means that if you don't cheat, you have no reason to complain. By reverse-perverse logic, you're implicitly owning up you have an interest in cheating by raising issues about Turnitin.com.
I don't think the students are particularly concerned about IP rights. What they object to is that Turnitin.com makes a profit by using students' intellectual property against the students.
One can argue that, like Google, Turnitin.com only indexes a search database. The problem here is that Turnitin.com allows (without your consent) a select user group to find information that you haven't intended for distribution. Google on the other hand *has* your consent (i.e. robots.txt) and lets the whole world find information that *you* have put on public display.
--Bud
When it comes to a paper like "Write about different cellphone network technologies", even if i'm not "plaugurizing" I can still pull up an article on Wikipedia, translate it into my own words find a few references and be done in well under an hour.
If the problem statement is:
EvilCo Cell company have a single high power tower covering a large city. They only have 22 Mhz of bandwidth and their current FDMA scheme only allows 687 simultanous calls to be placed. Assuming they are free to change their phones, but cant get any new frequency space, discuss options for expanding the number of users they can handle.
then you really can't copy any significant part of your solution from the internet. Sure you can pull up a definition of CDMA but unless you really understand it, then there's no way you'll integrate it into your answer.
Have you sat down and looked at the curriculum these students face? They are facing national standardization (often driven by publishers catoring to more influential school districts in California and Texas). Ask any teacher and they'll tell you that while they might see their essay topics looked at from a fresh angle once in awhile, most students are just trying to go through the motions. That means they will faithfully try to regurgitate whatever opinion on whatever book they had to read they've already been given. To me, a database like this only catches the students who haven't yet learned to "put it in their own words". DO NOT confuse changing to words to defeat a database check with information assimilation. They will do it anyway. You can't beat cheaters with a database. You will only refine their methods.
If a student doesn't want to learn, that is his business. But if he wants to learn, good luck getting a good teacher because schools are more interested in this stuff than spending the money to get talented teachers in addition to the fools and martyrs already in their employ. I'm not saying there aren't talented teachers actually working every day to help their students achieve. I AM saying that the 75% attrition rate among new teachers after 2 years indicates that a serious hemmorage-producing syndrome is bleeding that talent away faster than it is replacing it. Spend the effort on better teaching methods if you want to prevent cheating. Ever heard of ink pens? They're great for making a permanent mark on a page, a mark generated by muscles connected to a brain that it is YOUR job, teachers, to try and engage and YOUR job, students, to actually use. If you want to see a student rise to a challenge, make them write a well-reasoned essay in pen during the class period. Do it several times a year and in all of their subjects and you will have a crop of students (cheaters and all) who can at least prove that they can do what this database seeks to by only peripheral means: write.
Of course they're not concerned about IP rights when they're infringing on the rights of RIAA/MPAA members. That's not the same as their work being added to this database without their consent. While they download music to enjoy themselves, turnitin.com is a profit-making enterprise that uses their work to make money.
Oh, and it really gets on my nerves every time I see theft from a billion dollar corporation compared to theft from an individual. Despite what the pathologically stupid law of the United States says, these two things are never the same. The fact that we treat them as such is one of the biggest problems with the world today.
Game... blouses.
The school give the background for and initiates the writing of the paper. What teen writes a paper about "Shakespeare's use of humor" entirely of their own volition? In a different context, if you told a Hollywood producer a wonderful story and suggested that they make a movie of it, you would want some of the $$$ when it hit the box office. Just because the teacher didn't write the word on the page, doesn't mean that they (or Shakespeare) didn't originate most of the ideas in the paper.
We are all just people.
So, in the first year, they paid at least $8,000 per cheater, and since then the cost has gone up to at least $24,000 per cheater? Way to spend tax dollars!
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will never want for work. - Unknown
God I remember high school....blech. I mean, I went a fairly decent one in Chicago, public yes. Gah...I still felt like I was in a prison and I was in one of the nicest ones around. Nothing against my high school in particular, it's just the way they're run, like factories where you had better line up and do what you're told; and if you step out of line, you'll get slammed.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Elsewhere in the terms, Turnitin.com states that it has unlimited rights to everything you do or say on the site EXCEPT for your submitted papers and your personal information.
Oh, and the above is copyrighted by iParadigms, 1998-2006, etc. etc. (^_^) Of course.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
About 35 years ago, a man was taking night courses in English, French history, and art. He's assigned to write a paper in each of the classes. The English paper had to be in English, the French history about something that happened in France, and the art paper about anything in art. At this time, there were no word processors, but there was carbon copy paper that would make two copies when hit by a typewriter. The man had seven children, a full-time job, and a shortage of time. He decided to write one paper about the history of French art and turn it in for all three classes (one original, two copies). He told all of his professors what he was doing (hard not to, when you're turning in a carbon copy). I think he got an A, a B-, and a C+.
The man involved was my father.
I believe the point of school is to train good employees. This just demonstrates how much under the thumb of the employer you will be once you get out. Students, like workers just need to deal with it. Of course this is more comparable to a law instead of workplace rules (as it is not possible for a student to change schools as easily as one changes jobs).
/. articles point out that there are services where papers/problems are solved for a fee; assuming these contracts are flexible students can start to demand absolutely non-plagiarized works. As the employer of the assignment contractors, the students have replicated their own school-to-student relationship, therefore the school system is working in preparing these kids for life. The kids that choose to hire a contractor simply choose a different role they play in this simulated life.
Nevertheless, like in life, the students sometimes just need to learn to play ball. When you have nothing you simply have to work for a living and you need to depend on the support of others, which is nearly always conditional.
At the same time a prior
I believe the best thing high school can teach and should be more honest about is that since you are just starting, you are nothing, you can't do anything, and you need to either take it or become an useless outcast (kinda like boot camp).
During our final programming assignment, our instructor monitored all data coming through the lpr, recorded all our unix command .history files, and wouldn't allow printouts to leave the lab. The jerk didn't think about something as simple as me just letting someone look at my printout.
.tar files! :D
The guy who copied my code was an old school cheater; he needed five lines of code to crack a problem that he was beating himself over the head with, and once he had the answer, it was nothing at all to write it in his own way.
He also explained every line of his code to our instructor. He never knew anything. Not even who ypsnarf'd his sun box and deleted all his log
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
So you mean to tell me that as these kids grow up, there will be yet another company holding their personal information?
And it's not just an address in a database, but it's every papery that they've written in grade school?
Jesus christ on a pogo stick. At what point does the FBI decide it's a good idea to scan this database when they're profiling an unknown perpetrator? When do they decide it's a good idea to scan this database so that they can "predict" who is likely to be the next Columbine shooter?
Copyright shmopyright. High school kids deserve a little privacy too.
it's just like everything that involves creating an original work, the originator of the work owns it. the exception (which isn't) is when someone signs a contract that transfers ownership to another entity (such as a business). this is understandable for code because the business may need to modify it at a later date, after the developer has terminated his employment; it would be detrimental for a business to not take ownership because then they'd have some big problems if the person stopped showing up.
It desn't matter if 100% of them are cheating. Breaking one rule doesn't allow another to violate copyright. The students own the copyright. You will never ever get any college to make a rule saying the student gives over copyright of their work. They will lose students in droves. Many of these students, especially the ones graduating will go on to use their work in College and possibly expand upon it to get their Masters and PHDs.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
" Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?" So that means it's ok to infringe IP rights because some students have infringed on the rights of others? Using that logic, it's ok to rob banks because some people already do it.
Turnitin is total BS. I wrote a paper on shinto creationism and it saw about 40% of what i wrote as plagiarised from a paper i had never seen. From what would have been an A paper i got a C- because it thought I plagiarised the japanese story of creation
Forcing me to write a paper on the American Civil War twice is not going to make me learn anything, other than that a professor or an academic policy needs to be changed.
Is it impossible for you to have more than one thought about the American Civil War or do you know so much about it that you can't possibly learn anything new?
If there is a way to use the site without adding the student's paper to the database, it is the school's responsibility to use that feature. If the site does not support this, then the site should not be used. The students have a legitimate claim to their own copyrighted works and if their schools violate them, they have no right trying to enforce ethical guidelines.
I'm a brilliant person, devoted to studying, and generally held in esteem by my peers and professors. I also have a fairly lousy GPA. But for a few good reasons:
1.) I have never copied or plagarized, ever. To the detriment of my own grades.
2.) I have test anxiety.
3.) I have cluster headaches which seriously debilitate me at random intervals.
So I really have no problem with schools using a site to automatically check for plagarism. Hell, make the database encrypted and unaccessable to anyone unless there's been a positive match on a search done by staff at a "registered" college. To be real nice about it, 'pay' the students royalties in the form of lump sum deductions on their tuition. I know I wouldn't mind agreeing to such provided it means we're all working that much more honestly and harder. (Or - have all the students sign an agreement saying once they turn in their work it's agreed to be made available for this site.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Gentlemen, start your perl scripts!
I sure wouldn't want to be the TA to grade that mess.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This should've been the first comment, it's the entire student side of the story.
Its funny, my first research paper i did in HS i was accused of plagarism. My social studies teacher could not believe that I could use in a sentance some of the words i used. He marked several wrong until showed them him in a dictionary. I think it all came from the way i devoured books my last 2 years of middle school. Ahh thus turn it in thing would have made life a tad simpler for me.
You mad
You have spent your whole school career learning about other peoples work, and concepts they have described, but now you think you own the rights to your schoolwork.
This system is designed to catch people who just copy other students instead of thinking for themselves. There is no IP infringement because the work is all unoriginal anyway. Maybe we should reinvent the wheel everytime a new school year starts ...
The only real exception I can see would be creative writing, but unless Turnitin are publishing students works as their own, then there is no problem. If the student tries to submit a piece of creative writing later in their school career and it seems they already submitted that previously, then obviously, they are not complying with the spirit of the assignment. Creative means just that, not regurgitated.
... to defeat this system
How hard would it be to construct an essay to create a high number of false positives? I had in mind something like Cantor's diagonalization method, take and alter the first sentence from one essay, take and alter the second sentence from another essay... and cobble it all together to form a new essay.
What if people were to generate and submit many such papers to increase the rate of false positives?
I'm sure someone has thought of better ideas than mine.
Does TurnItIn perform its document comparisons using only literal word for word checking, or does it also account for synonyms?
If it's also accounting for synonyms, then doesn't such a system eventually risk becoming over-saturated with data, rendering the entire service useless? In theory, such a system could eventually contain every possible method of combining words within the english language.
I actually have some experience in the development of an app that could potentially accomplish just that. The app in question was a sort of "intelligent" find and replace system that could import any text document, run it through a user-customized synonym database, then apply the synonyms in various areas of the document at random. Given a large enough synonym database, the app could have become the ultimate tool for plagerism.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I attend one of those nation-wide "chain" universities that requires use of TurnItIn for some classes. They make the student submit the work, then download the TurnItIn Originality Report it generates, and upload it with your work to the class Drop Box. Obviously, all works are submitted electronically in those classes. The professor does, or course, have access to the work and report via TurnItIn.com (they'd have to, since you could fake your report). You are supposed to have less than 20% matches. From what I've seen of its behavior, it appears to compare your paper to the URLs you provide (you did cite your sources, right?) as well as other websites (Googling your sentences, perhaps?). If it really is comparing your work to other archived works, the archive must be very limited. The only hits on my works have been my Works Cited citations (exactly matching other bibliographies -- go figure), direct quotations (properly quoted and cited), and in one essay, my intro sentence exactly matched the sentence on some website I'd never been to. Not a terrible surprise there, when millions of things have been written on the very basic topic I was writing about. Millions of students and professionals have been writing repeatedly about the same topics for decades. At first I was worried, how could I possible produce something that a computer would consider "original"? So far, there have not been any matches to a single bit of any student papers, only to web sites. To be honest, that seems odd. I might be a weird person, but could I really have that unique of an outlook on such standardized topics? Doubtful. This suggests to me that 1) either they haven't been collecting student papers for long, or 2) they're not collecting student papers at all. Perhaps TurnItIn is a scam, with nothing more than a very simple web crawler and search engine, checking your work against your own linked references and maybe whatever some websites its visited in the past. I've seen people worried about referencing their own past works. This national university covers that topic in its (many) references to plagiarism. They require you to get permission from your current professor before you use your old work (and they can deny it), you must provide a copy of the old work with the new work, and your new work must be based on less than 25% of your old work. That's right, not only does the school feel it is possible to plagiarize yourself, but they specifically don't want you to, without their permission. That might seem silly, but thinking about it, it really is in line with other, older citation policies. If you're in a class writing an essay on a topic, you're not likely to be a peer-reviewed published author on the topic. In school, your citations are meant to be published authors that are peer-reviewed, or that otherwise have sufficient "authority" on the subject. My opinion about using TurnItIn? I like it. My essays become school property anyway, for them to do with as they please, even if that means selling it. In '95-'98, attending the Univ of Arizona, our professors told us our papers may be compared to national databases. We weren't worried about it then, and I'm still not. To be honest, I'd rather the cheaters got caught and got kicked out of school for it. The fewer opportunities open to losers like that, the more opportunities for people that deserve it.
I picked a random local university to check their copyright-ownership policy. Some bell rang in my head suggesting that Universities claim they own the rights to the IP of their students while they are students (basically the school wants to produce the brilliant idea rather than letting the students). However before I could find such a thing (I now doubt I was correct) I found that the randomly picked university links to a Turnitin "Legal Opinion" based on Australian copyright law ..
One salient point follows:
It is a question of fact in each instance as to the extent to which a student may have granted an implied license for reproduction or communication of his or her work when submitting it for assessment. An express license to a university to reproduce a student assignment and communicate it to the Turnitin server would be granted by a student who signs a cover sheet for an assignment which contains the following acknowledgement (for example): I declare that this assignment is original and has not been submitted for assessment elsewhere, and acknowledge that the assessor of this assignment may, for the purpose of assessing this assignment: Reproduce this assignment and provide a copy to another member of faculty; and/or Communicate a copy of this assignment to a plagiarism checking service (which may then retain a copy of the assignment on its database for the purpose of future plagiarism checking).
I've never had to use their service since I tested out of all but one English course for my degree, but I work with students every day as an employee for the English department, and I have to say that this service bites. It did nothing but give us headaches (none of the support staff knew how the site worked, and the students wasted so much time figuring it out that they could have written better essays with it). It's like living in the Soviet Union--even something as innocent as low-level academic papers written by undergraduates are being scanned and torn apart for "unauthorized" content.
Imagine my discomfort when I found out that they had begun indexing my personal website without permission. They had every right, to be sure (the site *is* public, after all), but I knew what they were doing with the information, and I don't publish material just to have it used against my fellow students. Not only do I disagree with the effectiveness of Turnitin.com's service, but also the ethics behind it.
As a response, I let them know that they weren't going to be using my content. I also blogged about it on my main page.
It's about time somebody protested.
The Copyright Office holds a large enough portion of any registered copyrighted work to check for cheating and plagarism. Why not just lobby the government to create a searchable database over the content of all the registered works and then have students send in a copyright registconcrete weightration on all the papers they write? That way the school doesn't even have to do anything, the copyright office can detect the infringement and the origical author can sue them for it. Problem solved.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?
Downloading copyrighted material from the Internet is not, per se, copyright infringement. In fact, most copyrighted materials on the Internet are intended for download and can be legally downloaded.
Furthermore, your implied assertion that it's OK to violate someone's copyright just because they violated someone else's doesn't hold.
Finally, arguments like your "statistically speaking" argument is not tenable. Even if 80% of students did commit criminal copyright infringement, that gives you no right to lump the remaining 20% together with them and collectively accuse them all.
i turn a paper into turnitin (which i'm forced to do, i don't have a choice) they compare it to other papers in their database to make sure i didn't cheat (this is also fine). then they add my paper to their database to make sure that someone doesn't borrow my paper, without my consent (actually i consent when i upload my paper, but i'm forced to do or take a 0 on the assignment). essentially the "product" they offer is my paper. turnitin is making money off of my writing. this is where i see a problem.
All that would be needed is for someone to submit random entries repeatedly. They could even be tailored for topic using search various techniques. Use several similar iterations of key subject words forcing the false positives to increase. They end up having to buy more storage, processing, hosting, usw, just to maintain their QoS. If false positives go up, their user base goes down, making it all unprofitable. Run 'em into the ground I say.
Someone hates these cans.
This would be interesting. I wonder how many would pop up as plagerized?
If the system just sends a hash or signature information to Turnitin then it probably doesn't infringe unless you can argue that hashes and signatures are transformative works and therefore covered by copyright. If however the full text of the paper is sent to Turnitin then analyzed, I don't think it would be much of a stretch to argue that it violates the students right to control the distribution of their work under copyright. Since the U.S adopted the Berne Convention all works are entitled to protection upon their creation, though statutory damages are only avaliable when the work is registered with the Copyright Office(Tile 17 U.S Code Section 412). The school might be able to claim fair use, but I doubt Turnitin would be able to since it profits from teachers sending in papers as well as the addition of student papers to it's database.
IANAL.
"Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?" You damn right I'm concerned. For someone to make a blatantly retarded speculation like that really pisses me off. If I find out that any of my papers are in their database heads are gonna roll.
I'm not trying to be a troll here, but it is interesting that the Slashdot crowd has such a pro IP rights opinion based on their general tone towards the music, movie, and software industry.
Make sure you get a copy of that license agreement. You'd hate to waste money trying to prove that they changed it after you clicked I Agree.
My understanding of copyright is that, like patents, it's based on the public good, not natural rights. The state grants copyright so that IP creators reap the benefit of their creations, thereby prompting more IP creation and benefitting the public generally. So, the question then becomes, does a service like turnitin.com serve the public good? Isn't ensuring fairness in grading a public good?
Another issue: isn't a service like turnitin.com ultimately trying to protect IP? If a student copies text without the author's approval (say, from the web), he/she is violating IP right there.
Copyright law protects you no matter how bad you are in school.
If you really believe this you don't have much experience with academic work.
Most universities have rules about this exactly because the fact that someone managed to write a paper right after having read a book about it a few years back proves nothing about what they know about the subject today, and because work during a course is meant to give the instructors an idea of the development of your skills.
If your knowledge and understanding of a subject haven't developed at all since the last time you wrote an essay on that subject, despite taking a course covering the subject, then you're not doing very good work.
Especially university level work is not only about the end product, but about proving that you are capable of carrying out academic work and demonstrating how skilled you are at expanding your knowledge and communicating what you have learned.
If you do an MSc. for instance, the end product rarely has much value - few people contribute much to the knowledge of their field in an MSc. thesis. The key thing is the work you have put in to demonstrate your ability to carry out a research project from start to finish within a reasonable timeframe. The thesis on it's own mainly has value as a way of assessing those skills, and if you've self-plagiarised that purpose isn't met.
IANAL, but I would expect most courts to honor the site's terms of usage over the copyright notice you post in your file, just as no court would force this site to remove my comment if I wrote "User does not grant permission to display this information on slashdot" in the comments I submitted here.
If, on the other hand, it is your school submitting the work, not you, you would have cause for legal action. Turnitin would be in the clear, though, because they would simply remove the content and force the school to indemnify them. Again the terms of use:
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
So, an agreement made at the beginning of your studies can't possibly convey something that does not exist, nor can a policy possibly be construed as an instrument of conveyance.
I don't see that as an obstacle. It's not clear to me why an agreement signed at the time you enter college couldn't be used as an "instrument of conveyance" as required by this particular law. But there are several possibilities here. First, that you agreed to waive copyright powers with respect to the university when you submitted the work, that submitting a copyrighted work is against the contract you signed with the university, or that posting this sort (ie, something turned in for an academic grade or requirement) of copyrighted work to "turnitin.com" is allowed by your contract with the university.
OK so there are 22M papers in the database now, with more being added every year. The likelihood that another paper will come close enough to a stored paper, and thus labeled a cheat, increases dramatically as the database grows.
This issue will be complicated by the fact that there are only so many points to make on how Holden Caulfield lost his innocence.
Even a paper typed by 10K monkeys will eventually be duplicated given enough time.
Don't even get me started on the database not owning the content it charges access for.
Yep, they employ a web crawler that goes about sucking data of websites, too, so the entire contents of this thread are now going to be used against some high school student writing about the evils of copyright infringment.
Way to go interwebs!
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
It's a legal way of accomplishing their true goal, to permit cheating by their fellow students.
You're showing gross distrust to the 99% of people who don't steal.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Don't allow the works to be viewed entirely, instead, the teacher would submit the suspected work, and if it's similar in more than one/few regards, the suspected plagiarism is exposed to the teacher by the site. Works held by the site should not be kept with the creator's name, school, or any other identifying information, unless the creator wants it to bear such information.
Even if that is so, two wrongs do not make a right.
Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet.
So, it's now OK to infringe on the rights of the innocent to catch the guilty, is it? I guess they must be "intellectual terrorists" or something, as flagrant breaches of human rights used to be the only justification for throwing away hundreds of years of legal custom.
Why on earth would you write a paper on the same subject?
Inevitably, over the course of an academic career you'll have opportunities to pick paper topics that overlap your previous paper topics. If you loved writing that paper and are interested in further investigation, you'd pick the same topic and go deeper or in another direction. If you feel done with the subject, you'd pick something else. College isn't high school; you can choose your field, your classes, your professors, and your paper topics. Don't try blame it on the professor's ego, laziness, or lack of creativity. If you're ending up with paper topics that are boringly similar to each other, you're intentionally selecting them to avoid thought and effort. So yes, I think that would be considered 'missing the point of education.'
Many fallicies in most of these arguements.
1. Contract can be used to assign IP
2. Copyrightable works are being created but contract is what is happening here
3. Typically, institutional policies, as a condition of attending, require that all IP made with some use of institutional resources is assigned to the institution
4. Resources are broadly defined, ie. work space, computers, lecture space, faculty advice etc.. so the IP often belongs to the institution and they can do what they want with it
5. So, if you write something for a course, even if you are paying for the course, the IP belongs to the institution
6. Finally, and this applies to those who reuse code all the time, most plagiarism policies will consider it plagiarism if you submit the same, or similar text, to two courses, even if you are the author on both. Basically you can plagiarise yourself.
With the $45 per use royalty fee that ALL students should add as an addendum to thier papers, this will make thim all filthy, filthy rich!
The 25% who cheat are devaluing the efforts of the 75% who do not. Moreover, a school that fails to exercise due diligence against its students is cheating those students who cheat and get away from it. An important mission of college and high school is to teach students that the consequences of plagiarism are catastrophic. It is important that they learn this while they are in school where the worst that can happen is usually a failing grade. In the professional world the consequences of plagiarism are often the end of a career and permanent damage to one's reputation
One real problem is that if you're assigned a paper on Shakespeare or Lincoln or Hemingway, there probably isn't much original that you can say. Those subjects have been done to death. If some service has a few million papers on Hemingway on file, the odds are fairly good that some false hits will show up.
The example of plagarism TurnItIn gives on their web site (try the "plagarism tour") is "Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue." vs. "Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War was part of an even bigger issue". How many different ways can you cover that concept? TurnItIn might accumulate tens of thousands of basic essays on Lincoln in a single year. If any clash at that level is considered plagarism, it's going to be really hard to write anything unique on common subjects.
Perhaps in future book reports will have to be assigned on books with an Amazon PageRank worse than 5000, to provent false collisions. Essays will have to be assigned on obscure subjects. Of course, this means the teachers must do more reading.
I see people confuse these two all the time. In fact, I've seen a number of teachers write "loose" when they mean to say "lose".
Pretty sad, if you ask me.
"You can easily make a fair use argument, it's being used purely for educational, non-profit purposes."
Fair use has nothing to do with education or non-profit... at least not the way you mean it.
If I start a non-profit corporation (easy to do, just fill out the paperwork), it doesn't insulate me against copyright suits. Nor does the fact that it's an educational institution help. Otherwise, an elementary school could make copies of CD's to give to their students to teach "music appreciation" (think about it for a bit).
Finally Turnitin is the issue here, not the school. Turnitin is a for-profit company.
So no. I think Turnitin is at-risk. And should be. They're breaching copyright.
Tu quoque...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
John Barrie, the creator and owner of the Turnitin service, responded to issues of student ownership of their creative works in the May 17, 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, freely available online. He syas, in response to the charge that "students feel coerced into submitting their papers to the service, and . . .that they objected to handing over their work because doing so would undermine their legal rights":
"Mr. Barrie responds that professors can explain to students why that assertion is wrong -- as he argues -- or just tell them, 'Write as much creative stuff as you want -- just don't do it at this institution.'"
Seriously, what kind of idiotic advice is this? For that reason alone, I will not use Turnitin, even though the University where I teach has just purchased a license. We are currently debating how it will be used on our campus, which I won't mention here (though you could find it easily enough I suppose; it's probably in my profile).
He was also the guy behind the Ann Coulter plagiarism story a few months back. When her editor wanted his evidence, he told them they'd have to subscribe to his service. When others did look into it, plagiarism was found, but his handling of it is the work of an attention-seeker, at best (a scam-artist at worst).
This is from a draft pamphlet I wrote as Education Officer for my Student Union. The end result is better, but I just don't have a copy on hand. What is Turnitin? Turnitin is plagiarism detection software (PDS). PDS is software that is intended to help lecturers and others detect possible plagiarism in assignments. How does Turnitin work? Your assignments are sent electronically to a database in the USA. The software then matches text in your assignment to documents in its database that are collected from the Internet and also from various journals. Any matches are then flagged for review by the submitter and/or marker. Because Turnitin might not fully detect all matches the marker also has to use their own knowledge and skills to detect plagiarism. How does UTas use PDS? UTas uses Turnitn for about 10% or one unit (mainly first year) in each school.1 Assignments are submitted electronically via a WebCT Vista plugin by the student. Should I be worried? Turnitin is a tool used by the University to help detect plagiarism. If you have not plagiarised in an assignment you should not worry about this loosing you marks. What about my copyright? The University explicitly disclaims a right to students work that is produced while as a student. However, by signing a coversheet (unless you explicitly disclaim it) your work will remain on the Turnitin database in the USA with your permission. However, as this is not in Australia, it would be hard for any case to proceed based on this. This work produced by the TUU 2006 Education Officer and is released free to use for any purpose, including modification. This is not legal advice, for legal advice please contact a lawyer.
I wank in the shower.
It's a service to the students who do NOT cheat. If you struggle for hours to research and write your own paper, yet get a worse grade than someone else who bought theirs, you may suffer instead of benefiting from your honesty. Even if you learned more than the cheating student, you may be denied admission to schools, scholarships, or even jobs which are given to the cheaters on the basis of their higher GPAs... an outcome which is bad for education and society in general.
I don't want to about how only truly clever and effective people are smart enough to cheat when homework assignments are BS anyway, okay? While a minute knowledge of James Joyce probably won't help a student design a better engine, the ability to research a problem, to synthesize information, explain a thesis, meet a deadline, and distribute credit fairly are valuable skills that are needed everywhere. These are skills that are not learned or rewarded when students plagiarize.
This may have been posted already (aged eyes miss things) but whilst the students may indeed download material off the Net, they may do so for purposes already legally permitted, that is use of limited sections of the authors work(s) for purposes of education (NOT mass copying straight into a paper either verbatim or rephrased), the same cannot be said for www.turnitin.com who are gathering masses of original work on a database and are using that material to make a profit - this would seem to me to be a clear breach of copyright. Has anyone considered informing the authorities of www.turnitin's dubious practises vis a vis copyright law?
Commander Taco argues rhetorically, "it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?" Papers are often available on the Internet as PDFs expressly for the public--academic or not--to download. It is legitimate under fair use and academic fair use to "download," which strictly speaking could be as simple as hitting a web page, material and use it in papers as long as you cite sources properly. This is not the same thing as uploading someone's intellectual property to a site without the author's permission, without any compensation to the author, and for use other than the author's intent.
Plagiarism is a problem. I recall one of my professors saying she busts someone every quarter. It is not cool. The minimum penalty is an "F" for the class and expulsion is possible or, depending on the school, probable.
But Commander Taco might be talking about peer-to-peer file sharing of music, and thereby accusing all students who protest the use of turnitin.com of stealing copyrighted music. He paints with a broad brush.
A student's work is his own intellectual property. For a school system to exploit his work without compensation is theft. It is one issue to turn in homework meant only to be graded and returned to him/her. It is quite another for this work to find itself in the marketplace to be sold and resold and used to harass other students in other schools. What these students need to do is to 'sue the bastards'...and collect. In this legal environment of copyrighting everything and patenting nonsense like the turnstiles in the Wal-Mart stores as 'patentable business methods'., then IP is everything that ANYBODY creates, period! That includes student work assignments. Hey, say the assignment is a short story, and the student is good enough at writing to sell his work. Say an enterprising 'teacher' takes it and sells it as his own, or patents the theft of his captive student's work as a 'business method'. This is possible at this school! On top of this, that huge database could have stories and other valuable works there already in luculan abundance to be cherry picked an quietly sold in the magazine and media marketplace by unscrupulous operators of that 'service'.
Notwithstanding all of the above, on the theory that a million monkeys on a million typewriters could produce all the literature of the world eventually through random events, then eventually no student will be able to produce any sentence that had not been written before by SOMEBODY!
WHAT THEN!!??
> "Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"
Wow, that's one wicked double-standard. Folks so often critisize young people - especially university students - for disrespecting the IP rights of musicians and the movie industry with mp3 and avi downloads. Then they scoff when the students are concerned for their own IP rights. That's both insulting and narrow-minded.
What if you wrote a paper wanted to turn the same paper or a somewhat improved version in to a later class? If TurnItIn automatically adds it to the database, it will mark it as fraudulant, even though it was all yours. It also opens the door for cheaters to claim that's what happened to them.
Ok, so plagiarism is bad. We all know this. But lets take a look at what's bad about it here in particular.
1) You are SUPPOSED to be learning about a topic(subject, etc., whatever), and researching it yourself.
If you plagiarize someone, you're avoiding the entire point, and not learning. This is the main problem in a specifically academic situation.
2) It's morally wrong to copy someone else's work without giving credit.
Ok, so what. Why is this such a HUGE deal that you can get expelled for copying some or all of a single paper in a single course. We know it's bad. We know it should be punished. But what's the big friggen deal? Simply put, it's easier to deal with it this way than to fix the actual problem(s) in the academic process.
So what then, is the magic solution? How do you discourage this type of cheating, and what do you do in situations where it is exposed? Well, here are a couple thoughts:
First, if you have a discussion about papers with students, you can tell pretty quick how well they know the paper they're supposed to have written. The professor can do it, or TAs could do it, so don't say it'd take too much time to go through every student. It wouldn't take much more time than grading papers, or checking them against this stupid online DB.
Second, if you get a student caught plagiarizing, the FIRST offence should be dealt with in a way that doesn't totally screw their entire lives up. Have a Copyright sensitivity course or something which requires students to learn about what they've done, why it's wrong, etc. And have the course be a 0 credit course, that becomes mandatory if you cheat, and still costs as much as a regular course. Cheat again and you're out.
Finally, there's a bunch of ways this system could backfire horribly, and generate TONNS of false positives. i.e. If one TA is responsible for uploading papers to the system, and another cross checks them. If they don't co-ordinate, then the papers get uploaded first, and they get flagged against themselves. Or, if the system is too sensitive, it will flag a paper with a paragraph from another paper which is properly credited within the "offending" paper.
The point is, this is a stop gap solution to the extraordinary hands off way students are treated in academic institutions. With so much money and time going into getting a university degree, with so much pressure and emphasis on the importance of that degree, it's easy to see where a student could grab a paper off the net for the course that fell off their plate, or their worst subject. This solution only serves to further dehumanize students.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
It's amusing to realize that the "Lincoln never let the world forget" line on the Turnitin site is copied from the Kid's Section on the White House web site.
What do you say when you find your doctor stops attending all these refresher courses at his hospital etc, on the grounds that "once he's learned it, he knows it"?
Must be fantastic to have an infallible memory.
I had a uni assignment that required us to implement a priority based queuing algorithm. Of course, we had to reference where we found the algorithm.
I chose to implement my own lottery based system (seemed different enough), and went along with it.
Of course, because I didn't reference an algorithm thinking it was original, I was forced to trawl the web to find another implementation of a lottery based queue system, and use that as a reference, despite of the fact that I'd never come across that piece of work before, nor heard of a lottery based algorithm until that point.
It was the most frustrating time I'd ever had at uni.
Learning to cheat is an inherent part of survival. A study on how honest people were (in the western world) indicated that we normally distrusted others, and justifiably so. Also that our society would not work if people were honest. Take a look at how many jobs are based on checking honesty, or creating systems that are cheat proof.
I would have to agree with this analysis of Copyright. Further since copyright is a tort, (in Australia and England at least) unconscionable conduct at the start of a degree by a University to deprive a student of their IP rights would make any agreement null and void. The level of compensation of the student and the knowledge of what they may be signing away would be looked at by a court and any unilateral agreement assigning IP to obtain a degree / diploma would in my opinion be set aside by a court.
>>Re-use even of one's own previous work, is also academic dishonesty and in the same category as plagarism. You cannot submit a paper written for one class as fulfillment for an assignment in another class.
i arism
That's ridiculous. If you are smart enough to figure out how to answer assignments for two different classes with one turnin, you deserve an A in both classes.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=plag
Plagiarism: 1. the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
Plagiarism is stealing other people's work, not your own.
"So when 500 or more assignments (per semester!) get made for: write a 2-3 page paper, using these sources, on x topic thats been written about to death; none of them are going to be similar?"
No kidding! I mean how many papers are written on:
Romeo and Juliet
Hamlet
MacBeth
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
Animal Farm
Brave New World
Just those titles alone might very well produce millions of written papers each year...
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
n/t
one of the classes I think that high school really could use is some kinda philosophy, but it's absent in most curricula. I'm guessing because of the parental complaint or even lawsuit factor if people started discussing gay rights, morality through religion, civil disobedience, etc
How disappointing. I thought you were going to recommend philosophy be taught in high school. I in fact am of the opinion it should be taught in middle school. But I don't think it means what you think it means
The topics you describe fall under contemporary events, politics, or ethics, not philosophy. What's missing from public school is exactly what philosophy is supposed to provide: critical thinking skills. It might be argued that these simply cannot be taught in large-group settings. I'm not sure, myself.
They definitely cannot be taught by following a curriculum voted on by a committee who was appointed by another committee. My kids will be educated at home.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I'm a keyboard monkey. So unless they are doing handwritting analysis I don't know how they are going to eventually distinguish student papers. I guess they forget it is an assymptotic rule that many of these papers are bound to be similar if not dead on eventually. What is next? Mandatory root kits for the teachers? Sony!!!??? Where are you!!!????
Most teachers I ever had in school would frown upon this. In fact, I had a professor in college who I took for more than one english class, and several times he assigned me something else because I had more or less already completed the assignment. The obvious solution to your scenario is to ask the teacher first. He can't say "sure turn it in" then come back with "HAHAHA UR A CHEATR PWNED." Basically, what you described is only a crutch or excuse for people who actually cheated. Any reasonable person thinking about resubmitting an assignment would ask the teacher first.
... but, good luck getting shit changed with the teachers lobby pushing so much weight.
For what it's worth, most private schools, though possibly more advanced, still suffer from the same issues. I have done all 3... public, private and home schooling. I went to one of the best public school districts in the nation, which was efficient(ly boring). The relatively inexpensive private school I eventually attended far exceeded the capabilities of the public ones.... but nothing compared to homeschooling for both its ability to educate and ability to keep my interest.
The head of a local homeschool association is a surgeon. Learning anotomy, biology and chemistry first hand is excellent... Sadly, most of the surgeries I was able to witness were cancer removals, there was still a much greater desire on my part to learn. Obviously things like this aren't ideal; having hundreds of kids watching surgeries would be overwhelming. I'll be the first person to say, if they ever do surgery on me, I hope they invite any student who wants to learn.
Then again, I can just imagine all the immature giggles that would happen outside of a breast or colon cancer removal (the two most comon I attended).
College was far less boring than public or private schools... but then not as exciting as the real world.
I'm a student, I write my own papers from start to finish. If I'm writing about a popular topic it stands to reason that some of my content may resemble someone else's. Let's say one sentence out of 50 matches a sentence in another paper. Is this enough to be counted as plagiarism? I would say no. on the other hand one in 5 strikes me as likely being plagiarized. Where between the 2 points is the line between plagiarism and coincidence?
If you are in two classes and have similar assignments, choose a different frickin' topic for the second one or if that's not possible, at least tell the prof that you have already researched this topic and ask if he/she wants you to do more in-depth research or if he/she wants you to write about something else.
You take a class to learn something new. What benefit do you derive from submitting old work? I can certainly understand not reimplementing quicksort for 5 different CS classes, but for writing courses, don't resubmit old work. At least not without first telling the prof that that's what you are doing.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Hmm.. I trying to figure out if/how this business model is much different than the Google Book search. Both seem to be building a database of copyrighted material without the willing consent of the copyright holder. Anyone have any insight?
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
In 2000 I contributed a chapter to a book on U.S. launch vehicle history. Before I sent my final draft to the editors, I ran it through Turnitin. This I did as a form of self-preservation, because given that the vast portion of my chapter was heavily based on other sources, I wanted to be sure that I had done an adequate job of paraphrasing and attribution. (My scan, by the way, came up clean.)
Now, while I have some concern that a copy of my chapter resides on Turnitin's servers, I am fairly certain that no more than appropriately-sized excerpts will ever be reprinted there, and then only in cases of likely inappropriate borrowing. Moreover, I am happy that it's there, for this reason: it establishes a record of prior existence. No one subject to a Turnitin review will be able to crib from me without proper attribution.
None of this, of course, has prevented a substantial case of plagiarism of my chapter by a contributor to the Thor rocket page on Wikipedia.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
And let's be honest, none of these students is actually producing anything that's inherently valuable, we're talking high school level papers here
You can make that statement about any work of intellectual property, short of perhaps a Nobel Prize. Ironically, Nobel prizewinning work is often not protected by IP law, because science and mathematics are expressions of natural law, and considered the common property of humankind.
A student at a college which subscribes to Turnitin.com put a copyright statement on his essay, saying that his work couldn't be uploaded to any WWW site and archived. This meant that it couldn't be submitted to Turnitin.com (or a service such as Plagiserve.com, a free alternative to Turnitin.com that also archives submitted papers), which archives papers and adds them to the database that submissions are checked against.
The college checked with their lawyers, and with Turnitin.com on what to do if a student puts a copyright on their own work expressly forbidding their paper to be co-opted by a for profit service such as Turnitin.com. Below is Turnitin.com's reply to the matter of student copyright (They don't think much of it.).
See link for full text of turnitin response:
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/technotes/workshop s/fullcopyright.htm
This is a great business model for stealing IP from students.
Think about it, you scan in a student's paper. Then you sell it on the shadow sister site. Get people to voluntarily turn in thier papers, and then you have a ready source to sell from. Just like playing both sides of an war as an arms dealer.
The simple solution would be to place a greater emphasis on exams and essay questions, and less on "take home" assignments that give the student time to gather enough disparate sources to fool the system. Certainly, the quality of an essay written under those kind of time constraints is going to be of lesser quality than the student's full potential, but it would be easy enough for a teacher to simply lower their expectations with regard to style and spelling, and grade accordingly.
That, or just go with one-on-one interrogative exams.
The future of school:
At the beginning of the schoolyear, teacher sends home a contract to be signed by parent or legal guardian of student:
"As a condition for acceptance of student into this educational program, the undersigned agrees that all title and rights in any homework submitted by the listed student as part of such program will be completely and permanently transferred to the school."
I do believe that some are concerned about IP. Had I been involved in the movement, I'd have participated on priciple, i.e., "you can't have it both ways." If a record company or a software company or a bio-tech company can claim far-reaching rights, then individuals must do the same. This is a means to an end. I really don't care so much about the cause, but I do care about the impact it may have, namely the increased awareness of ownership rights. We need activists.
That being said, I'm not clear on who maintains ownership of papers. In an undergrad world, I imagine the institution retains the rights to student works. Anyone more aware of the particulars?
ascii art
What, it's not cool that she busted someone for plagarism, or that someone plagarized in the first place?
If schools force students to give up rights to their work in school, I can't see those students having much respect for the copyrights (or other rights) of others. At some point, students will reach hypocrisy overload, and decide that the rules under which they labor and the people who make them are not worth obeying - at other times, the thought that those in power might have some respect and concern for them might have restrained most students from revolting too strongly, but in an age where their parents have spent the seed corn and are waiting for their children to grow some more, this is unlikely.
If society thinks that it can train people who will obey and buy while systematically removing their choices and rights, they will likely be sadly disappointed - what society is likely to get is a set of people who don't believe in rules because the rules are the tools of those in power, and who do what they want, and to whom others are irrelevant. Ultimately, rather than a society based on the rule of law, you get a society based on the Golden Rule ("who has the gold (or the guns) makes the rules."), and then chaos, as "slavery is no longer a viable basis for a society."
The universities can easily own copyright to all your papers. And get used to it. Almost all companies you agree to work for make you sign agreements that everything you come up with while you work for them is their property.
If you dream up a new invention (Yes, at night in your free time) it belongs to your company; Copyright and patentablabe rights alltogether.
Just get used to it
"Fix it"
Well, I used to be, at least.
I have heard the "social skills" shibboleth from just about everyone to whom I've mentioned the idea of home education. It is an important point -- and I plan to incorporate community activities, team sports, and a number of other things into my "curriculum" at home -- but I think a lot of the people who make this point don't think very critically about what they're saying:
Yes, kids learn "how to socialize" in public schools. But what exactly are they learning? That the people who make the rules (teachers, admins) are your enemy; that it's fine and natural to form groups and exclude others based on criteria such as looks, or name brand clothing; that sucking up to authority is much more beneficial than questioning it.
In short I see tremendous value in group education as part of a complete upbringing, but damn-near resent the suggestion that this part of my child's upbringing is best left to a swarm of hormone-addled teenagers who are either angst-filled in rebellion against authority or indoctrinated into subservience to it.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"The universities can easily own copyright to all your papers. And get used to it. Almost all companies you agree to work for make you sign agreements that everything you come up with while you work for them is their property."
Nobody can force you to sign anything -- if they tried, whatever you signed would not be a valid contract anyway.
Now, *persuading* you to *choose* to sign, is a completely separate matter.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Take the GED, then take one course from a local college.
Then when they ask for your education with the little checkboxes "GED, High School Diploma, Some College, Bacchelors etc." you just put "Some College."
If that doesn't work, I say lie. I'm all for honesty 99% of the time, but I find the system of prejudices created by our educational system to be inexcusable. If you need to lie to be treated fairly, you have a right to lie.
And it's not like most people bother to check. One potential employer might, but that doesn't mean the next guy will. Hell, you can probably lie about having a PhD if you just instruct the school not to release your records without your signature...then if they call, they get "Yes, he attended here, but we're not allowed to release his information."
One thing I will say, though, is if you're going to lie, make sure you actually have the skills and knowledge the employer expects. It's one thing to lie to get your fair shot; it's another to lie to get a shot you didn't deserve to begin with. That and you're going to be a lot better off in the job if you know what you're doing.
If you want to do it legit, some high schools will actually give you class credit for the GED and/or for college classes. (I did both.)
Lastly, the most useful credentials are often not college degrees, but trade certifications. If there's a public certification or licensing system for a profession, getting that certificate guarantees you will beat anyone else who doesn't have it. In some cases, an employer in a publicly regulated profession *can't* hire someone who doesn't have the certification. And that limited labor pool increases wages. You'll usually have to pay for training to get the certification, but it will be a LOT cheaper than college. (You're talking $250-$2000 as opposed to $20,000 - $100,000)
All Hail the Maggott Show
Why should I? I did the research for each class. The overlap results in less work and satisfaction of the requirements. Why are you so hung up on my effort? If I can get things done with half the work, that's a good thing.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Ah, well that explains that then. I am not a reasonable person as anyone would tell you, a reasonable person adjusts themselves to the situation, while an unreasonable person adjusts the situation to fit them. Thus all progress depends on unreasonable people, such as myself.
I attend a large-but-not-the-largest University in Canada, and there was a huge campus fight over Turnitin.com last year. Initially the Administration said that any professor that wanted could use it without telling Students or offering them an option. After several long University Senate battles and a pair of Students refusing to submit their papers - and as a result, getting Fs and subsequently taking that F to the University's Judicial Board - the school adopted a new policy that said that teachers could use Turnitin.com if they wanted, but Students had to be informed and given an option to use a different method to show that it was their work: they had to provide several drafts of the paper, as well as show research notes.
Cue The Sun...
My teachers didn't need something like this to keep students from cheating. Of course, that was before the net was widely available, and certainly before this service came along.
That being said, I have a question: Wouldn't there be some, if not a lot of, similarities between most papers on the same subject?
Given the limited amount of knowledge being taught these days, and a less than adequate system for learning something other than being a "good citizen," what makes the "educators" think this would actually work well? If you get so many papers on the same subject together, there are bound to be some that *look like* copycats, but aren't. I would hate to have my grade hinged on this system. I say the students are right to fight this.
If I am a student that is selling my papers for other students to turn in, I would protest the use of turnitin.com as well, since it would significantly reduce the sellability of my papers.
When I was in high school, a couple years ago, we were told all bout TurnItIn.com, and what it did, and how it did it. The biggest thing was that we weren't given an option. And the classes that did use this were actually the ones with teachers who cared about us, and probably trusted us the most to not cheat. So, I'm not sure if this was his decision to use it, or if it was the school's/district's.
Either way, we weren't given the option of this. After our paper went into the machine, we had no clue what happened to it, or if it was even read by a hyumahn or not. Either way, I'm against total reliance on one system like this, for all schools. If all the schools in the United States, or the majority at least, were to rely on this, what kind of impact would it have should the system crash and have one or two days of maintenance before it comes back up (however unlikely that is, though a DDoS is possible)?
As far as the students ethics go, I find it rather... entertaining. I think they know so many things are done in the name of Intellectual Property that perhaps it's time they shows some of the absurdness of it all. Sort of like piracy: someone's going to figure out how to record that show and share it on the internet.
Oh, by the way, in case you're interested, anyone remember the Fake Paper Detector, created to detect papers put together with a script? It flagged one of my blog entries I feed through it for fun (complaining about the sorry state of Ubuntu/PPC before they cleaned it up) as being 66% likely to be fake. Just how infallible IS TurnItIn.Com, I wonder? Does anyone even know?
Rawr
These kids go to my school and I know most of them fairly well. It turns out that one of them asked our principal what would happen if we would want to remove our paper from the database. Apparently we have to wait a certain period of time. Contact the head librarian and we have to PAY to remove OUR papers. It is one dollar per piece of paper. Theres a great uproar here in Northern Virginia about this, and I think its justifiable. There should be an opt-out program. It is not the same as in college though, because (according to my law teacher here) you can choose to go to a certain college, and if you dont agree with their policies you can leave. But I am forced by the commonwealth of Va to go to this particular high school. Anyways yeah.....more updates to follow- and there is a rumor that there suspending turnitin at our school because one of the lead member's father (a lawyer)went in and talked to the principal. He asked if students refused to turn it in to the website they could receive a failing grade because of it, and he said yes. The father then continued to say that if his son lost a single point that he will sue the school.
John Barrie, owner of Turnitin.com, is the biggest hypocrite on the planet. I found out some very interesting things at Essayfraud.org, which questions Turnitin's shady tactics and why professors look the other way regarding Turnitin's blatant theft of students' intellectual property. I find it a tad ironic that for-profit Turnitin claims to fight plagiarism, yet John Berrie steals intelletual property on the grandest scale that the world has ever seen. You talk about the pot calling the kettle black! What a filthy hypocrit! And Turnitin does not pay a penny in royalties to any of the student authors from which they blatantly steal papers.
i ndex.html
Here is how the parasite, John Barrie, spins the fact that he operates a for-profit, "anti-plagiarism" business that HYPOCRITICALLY STEALS unwilling students' intellectual property in order to reap huge profits:
"The value to our company is not in the collection of words and characters in an essay, but in the series of numbers derived from the essay once we transform those words and characters into digital fingerprints," Barrie said. "In short, the value to us is not derived from the student's actual work."
-- John Berrie
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/21/ctv.plagiarism/
Well, that is obviously a load of barbage by the "King of Spin." The bottom line is that unwilling students' papers enable Turnitin to generate the "digital fingerprints" that generate millions of dollars in profit for Mr. Berrie every year. Without students' papers that enable Turnitin to produce the unique, "digital fingerprints" that are directly dependant on and generated by others' intellectual property, Turnitin could not exist. That is an undeniable fact.
Did John Berrie personally write the 20,000,000 documents stored at Turnitin.com? No, he didn't.
Does John Berrie own the copyright to each of those documents? No, he doesn't.
Does John Berrie have the right to profit in any way from the existence of those copyrighted documents? No, he doesn't.
John Barrie is a parasite. He is an underhanded, lying thief who hides behind the "Fair Use" banner! We should all run Mr. Berrie's morals through a "corruption-detection" program--at least we wouldn't have to steal from others to conduct that test.
This is one of the best posts I've read! Couldn't agree more.