Turnitin again
After the 50th referral from a google search on Turnitin, I decided it was time to update my thinking. (What do all of you people looking for “arguments against turnitin” and +turnitin +mcgill think?)
My objection to turnitin is not the presumption of guilt. Unfortunately, I think the presumption is, more or less, fair. Not to all students, but to the 1/3 who admit to cheating. That’s a big number. No one cheats in every class, of course. But I think it’s important to stem the tide. It would be nice if this were done in high school, too.
My real objection is the storage of papers. I decided to pose as a professor and submit one paper I wrote as a test. It came back fine: unsurprising, since I wrote it all in one last minute offline burst. (Someone changed the due date. I was not pleased.) It’s not a very good paper, and it’s nothing I’m going to ever look at again. I was tempted to write something copying from TheSpark, but decided it was more effort than it was worth.
What I think universities need are real and enforced policies against plagiarism or cheating (not all universities need the same policy, and community colleges probably need a different one too — but there needs to be something consistent). I would support it if professors could put papers they thought suspicious in turnitin if it was the case that 15 minutes on Google didn’t generally turn up the source. This would require studying, of course, but it’s probably not so difficult.
One of the problems with cheating is that it penalises the people who don’t cheat. Directly, if the course is curved, but also indirectly, by devaluing the degree from your school.
Which is why I *don’t* understand the backlash against other anti-cheating measures. Why would you care if a program checks for people who have all the same wrong answers as a first step in detecting cheating? Seriously. I remember people being horrified about it, and saying it was against some rule or another. So is not telling someone when you see someone else cheat, and I know how few people do that.
It’s not a simple issue, and I realise that. But it’s not a simple issue on either side.
January 24th, 2004 at 1:59 pm
As a freshman composition instructor, I’ve never had an issue using TurnItIn.com when I had a case of suspected plagiarism. Typically, I try Google first, as you mentioned, and then I use TurnItIn to further hone and/or confirm my suspicions. It’s nice to have something “official” looking to present to the student and department.
Our University doesn’t have an official plagiarism policy. There’s mention of an honor code of sorts in the student handbook, which is interpreted as including plagiarism. The English department developed a plagiarism policy that was very specific, but just when we moved to bring it into policy, the faculty backed down. I don’t know what happened with that as I’m an adjunct and not privy to the daily workings.
To contrast the teaching experience with TurnItIn.com, I took a class about a year ago in which we were required to use TurnItIn.com. Many of us were not pleased with this requirement because of the way the service archives submissions and we wanted to protect our intellectual property (such as it was in a graduate course) — the instructor seemed to understand our concerns, but refused to back down from the requirement. That experience left me with an uncomfortable feeling in requiring my students to use the service before turning in papers to me.
So I came up with a compromise. I typically apply a zero if there is a 20% plagiarism confirmation rate, no room for negotiation, revision or resubmission. Under 20%, and I look closer at the paper to see if it’s just poor documentation and then I consider the student’s performance thus far before choosing an option. It’s not a perfect solution, admittedly, but it’s working for me so far.
June 30th, 2005 at 7:38 pm
Since you may have to accept the fact that your paper will be in the turnitin.com database, you have two choices: 1) succumb to the institution and submit your paper knowing it will reside in turnitin.com’s database, or 2) play the game. If you can find a sympathetic professor/teacher with an account and/or obtain a subscription to turnitin.com either by self or as a campus literary organization, you can strangle the educational institutions use of turnitin.com by first submitting your paper under an assumed name or your nickname before you officially submit the paper to your professor/teacher. This way, the professor/teacher will have to research all the papers because they should be flagged for plagerism. Your response is simply, “I know my paper is my own work.” Take it as far as you dare until you explain you wanted to check your paper first so you already submitted it.