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Is Turnitin's anti-plagiarism servism fair to students?
NO
Bill Walsh
Turnitin sets a poor example for intellectual property rights
Poetic justice can be sweet, like when a thief is the victim of a robbery or when an anti-plagiarism company gets sued for copyright infringement.
The Internet has made it easier for students to find and submit work that’s not their own, but that same computer technology is being used to try to prevent such activity.
Turnitin is a “plagiarism prevention” service. Student assignments are fed into the company’s Web site, and a powerful search engine compares each student paper with (according to the company) more than 12 billion Web pages, over 10,000 periodicals, thousands of books and in excess of 40 million student papers. The teacher and/or student gets the paper back electronically, with portions that seem to have been copied from other sources highlighted. The report presents an index and links to the original passages with which the student work is “similar.”
Some schools or teachers feed kids’ final papers into the service to detect plagiarism, and if any is found, the student fails. Other disciplinary action may follow, based on the school’s academic honesty policy.
Other schools, including my own, try to avoid the “gotcha” approach and instead use Turnitin as a learning tool; the student submits the paper and gets the report back. What follows are timely lessons and examples on proper citation, paraphrasing and how to quote another source. The student can rewrite and resubmit the paper numerous times, fixing any possible plagiarism (conscious or subconscious) along the way.
Turnitin says that more than half of all unoriginal student work comes from students copying other kids’ papers, and so it’s very proud of its growing collection of papers from more than 10 million students. Each paper a student submits is added to the millions Turnitin already has in its database, and against which all new papers are compared.
Students claim the company is using their work without permission as part of its business, infringing on the students’ intellectual property, making money from it, and violating the very copyright laws Turnitin is supposed to be protecting.
A group of high school students in Virginia registered the copyright of their papers and explicitly told both their teacher and Turnitin that the papers were now protected and not to be added to Turnitin’s database. When the company ignored their request, the students sued for nearly $1 million. The case will probably go to court this fall.
And some lawyers are saying that the students have an excellent chance of prevailing.
Sometimes there are no easy answers, no computer-driven solutions to our moral quagmires.
You can’t steal stuff. That’s something students need to learn, but not from the hands of those who expropriate student work to teach them that very important lesson.
Bill Walsh has taught English for 34 years at Billerica Memorial High School in Billerica, Mass. The AFT member also writes "Media Watch," a local newspaper column.
YES
Randy McNally
Concerns about this valuable service are unwarranted
Student plagiarism has always been a topic of concern for educators. There is little doubt that with the burgeoning information age, the potential for problems has grown in recent years—from students who borrow a paper authored by a sibling or friend to pupils who buy an essay from an Internet “cheat site” to youngsters who simply copy and paste information from a random online source. Thankfully, the job of monitoring, preventing and correcting these abuses has been made easier for teachers by the introduction of products such as Turnitin, a popular plagiarism detection and prevention service used by schools, colleges and universities worldwide.
In K-12 systems such as the Springfield (Pa.) School District, Turnitin has proven its worth—not as a “gotcha” tool used exclusively to embarrass or sanction students but as a service that helps students understand what plagiarism is and why original thought is an important consideration in any academic venture.
Turnitin provides our district staff with immediate feedback and comprehensive understanding of students’ work.This detailed information allows faculty to engage in meaningful interactions with students. It enables educators to scaffold learning when it comes to such issues as intellectual property. And there is no question that the immediate feedback Turnitin provides is a major contributor to the students’ success and understanding of these important issues. This fosters increased, meaningful interaction on plagiarism and intellectual property in student-student settings as well as student-faculty discussions. Indeed, applications such as Turnitin assist in preventing students from claiming that work done by others is the result of their own efforts.
In the world of Wikipedia, the blogosphere, and other collaborative “open source” media, Turnitin provides an excellent opportunity for teachers to expand their lessons on the meaning of intellectual property. There has been recent debate about the role of Turnitin regarding intellectual property, questions concerning whether the service does in fact act as a guardian of intellectual property, but I feel these concerns are overblown. Those of us who use the service regularly know firsthand that these concerns are unwarranted: Turnitin acts as a fact checker of sorts for the submitted document and does not claim to have original authorship. Indeed, if a match is found, Turnitin credits the district that submitted the paper.
Our experience has shown us that Turnitin provides teachers with the most efficient method of ensuring that students are indeed performing their work, while also providing educators with a means to demonstrate the importance of “originality” to their students.
Randy McNally is director of information services for the Springfield (Pa.) School District.
