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?"

Comments

Re:Well

[wkitchen]

That being said, why not just add Wikipedia to the database and catch 99.9% of students, heh.

Sure, you'll catch your 99% that way. But only until the smart cheaters get wise to it and start using other sources and checking those against wikipedia themselves. After that, you'll only catch 98%.

Re:Intellectual property

[Anonymous Coward]

Also turnitin.com could be considered just a search engine like google.

Google only indexes content that has been made publicly available on the internet. Turnitin appears to be actively soliciting the violation of student's copyright. This is known as criminal contributory copyright infringement. The teachers or school administrators who turn in these copyrighted materials to turnitin are also guilty of copyright infringement. Thanks to the RIAA/MPAA, copyright infringement is not just a civil case but also a criminal case. When your teachers and school administrators are criminals, what are you expected to learn?

Let's try this on the **AA folks

[multisync]

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?

Re:A couple hypotheticals: (nope)...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because only professors should be able to use the same material year after year after year.

Re:my school

[radarsat1]

Wow, you could understand your school's PA system? Kids have it so easy these days... I remember hearing a fuzzy sort of crackle coming from the speaker, and someone would just go, "Uh, did it say something important?"

Re:my school

[couch_potato]

As someone (yes I live in backward Oklahoma, however Norman is somewhat educated) who was constantly in trouble for being different and difficult due to my overwhelming boredom with the monotonous teaching techniques used.

Perhaps you should try hard to pay attention, as that is a sentence fragment.

If you are the grammar police, consider me Internal Affairs. You are correct, that is a fragment. Good work, officer. However, he was speaking in the past tense, and you suggest that he should 'try hard to pay attention'. Pay attention to what? I believe you meant to say, "Perhaps you should have tried harder to pay attention [in English class]".

You are suspended for three weeks, with pay.

Cool links.

Re:Quality, not quantity

[revery]

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.

It's an interesting thought, but it brings to mind a quote I heard years ago: "Do you know what they call a medical student who graduates with the lowest passing grade in his class? They call him a doctor."

Re:my school

[MightyYar]

that includes not putting a regular H.S.'s name on an application/resume

I see that one of the courses that she missed was "Ethics"...