The McLean students’ protest against Turnitin is twofold, according to a recent Washington Post article: They feel betrayed, objecting to the “implication of assumed guilt” in requiring all students, even honest ones, to submit their writing. And they object to the storing of their papers in Turnitin’s database, a compilation of information that Turnitin touts in marketing its product because it allows teachers to see whether the papers they’re grading have been submitted by a student in the past or purchased from an online term-paper mill.

We side with the students.

The companies who market plagiarism detection technologies would like us to believe that they offer a simple solution to complex issues. Plagiarism detection services assert that cheating is a serious problem in American classrooms in part because of the ease with which students can copy and paste information from the Internet into their documents. They argue that their software is the definitive, easy-to-implement way to clean up higher education.

But tools such as Turnitin do not provide effective student-centered approaches for eliminating plagiarism and often make questionable use of student intellectual property.

In “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices” (available at http://wpacouncil.org/node/9), the Council of Writing Program Administrators urges teachers to “use plagiarism detection services cautiously.” For example, in functioning as gatekeepers that filter cheating, they create barriers between students and teachers. They have the potential to heighten students’ anxieties about writing and the correct citation of sources. They assume the worst of students and view student writing as a problem in need of intervention.

This problem is complicated further by the fact that many institutions also require students’ writing to be stored within the plagiarism detection service database. Legal issues aside regarding whether this is fair use of student writing, we want to encourage students to become responsible citizens by educating them on making the right choices and imbuing our trust in them. Allowing a third-party vendor to police the presentation of honest students’ ideas, preserve a copy for policing others, and make money off of their writing diminishes student authority over their work and interferes with student intellectual and civic development.

We also doubt that plagiarism detection services can support most direct efforts to teach students proper citation methods or point out the differences between plagiarism and acceptable fair use. The software cannot distinguish one student’s academic dishonesty from another student’s misunderstanding of how and when to cite sources. The software will not recognize when a student has made effective use of boilerplate text in their business or law classes. Granted, the software can detect textual similarities between a student’s paper and the writing in a database. But humans—educators—must decide how to interpret and respond to those similarities, including teaching students how to document quotations correctly and how to paraphrase or summarize thoroughly.

Only the teacher can help students with the more important ethical lessons that are at the center of understanding fair and appropriate use of intellectual property in various academic, professional and personal contexts.