Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse? 394
Foo Shackelford asks: "At my University I have noticed a disturbing trend and was wondering if there are any other students, faculty, or staff who have concerns about the web based anti-plagiarism service called Turnitin.com? Turtnitin.com is supposed to be is a placebo for plagiarism where students submit papers for analysis. While plagiarism is by all accounts bad and should not be tolerated, the implementation of Turnitin.com on University campuses leaves many questions unanswered. If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter. Where are the rights of the student? Also, there appears to be no warrantee to the accuracy of the service. Where does this leave the student who is accused of plagiarism? It would be nice for those who decide to implement the usage of services like these within their institutions to look beyond the placebo and consider issues of privacy, intellectual property, and most of all trust relationship that they hold with their students. Any thoughts on this?" We last touched on a related issue in this
article on students GPLing their work. Might such a solution work here in terms of protecting a student's right to use any work that they submit to other sites/services that have implicit contracts like the one described here for Turnitin.Com?
Sweet! (Score:2, Funny)
From my own experience... (Score:2, Funny)
GPL'd papers .... obvious plagarism ..... (Score:5, Funny)
I've said it so many times... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sort of like drugs, or for that matter software/music/movie piracy. There's no way to completely stop it, short of a police state. Turnitin.com seems to me to be a good example of that 1984-esque state. I'd prefer freedom with a side of poor ethics, thank you very much.
That, and college is about what you learn. Or at least I'd like to think it is. In fact, dare I say that's what I think life is all about. Maybe I'm just crazy. But despite the fact that it sounds like an after school special, it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.
So yes, plagiarism is bad, cheating is bad, and we should take steps to prevent it. But we should be realistic, realize that we'll never stop it completely unless we're willing to give up freedoms that I at least like having around, and let the cheaters screw themselves over in the long run.
Re:I've said it so many times... (Score:2, Troll)
Thus, the institution can't rely on pragmatism. They must prevent cheating if at all possible, as it reflects badly on them if a bunch of cheaters (thus, uneducated idiots) graduate from their institution, presenting a piece of paper with the institution's name on it.
Re:I've said it so many times... (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it intriguing that slashdot -- a forum for technically savvy people -- doesn't applaud the *application* of technology to solve a problem that would otherwise rely on purely subjective judgment by often biased teachers and professors.
The only things I don't like are the copyright treatment of the papers contained in the database, and the fact that the website/server complex that houses it is probably insecure. What a "honeypot", hacking the database so that it gives false positives or negatives.
D
That's pretty cynical! (Score:2)
Cheating hurts the cheater's classmates (Score:2, Informative)
Suppose you turn in (original) work which just barely deserves an A. Then suppose that your classmates turn in plagarized work which would deserve a strong A if they were not plagarized.
You then have the case either where everybody gets an A (and your grade is diluted, because your class/school gets a reputation for grade inflation), or you get a B because the other pieces of work are better than yours.
I have been in classes where I suspected other people of cheating, and I did not like it one bit when they got a better grade for it.
Re:I've said it so many times... (Score:2, Interesting)
Colleges can be hurt by cheating (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the common wisdom, and while it's true that someone who cheats their way through college may ultilmately be hurting themselves, there could be a negative impact on the college as well. Colleges and universities care a lot about their reputation and credibility, and if they pump out enough people who look much better on paper than they really are, it will ultimately have a negative impact on their reputations.
I'm not justifying this particular service, it does seem too extreme, but rather just saying that colleges do have a stake in not turning out too many graduates who have cheated their way through to a large degree.
Re:I've said it so many times... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheating always will happen but so will CATCHING cheaters. You cannot advocate turning a blind eye to cheating anymore than you can to burglary. Burglary will always happen...might as well just throw up your hands and assume (hope) that it will involve only a small percentage of the population so that you will only get hit with it once or twice in your lifetime BARRING locks, alarms, etc?
Just because something wrong happens (plaigerism) "all the time" does NOT mean you accept it and don't even try to nail the little sperm-burpers when they do it.
Re:I've said it so many times... (Score:2)
There is another alternative: having a working honor system. One of the underlying flaws of systems like this that try to impose ever stricter rules against cheating is that students view them as a challenge. The tougher you make the anti-cheating system, the cleverer students will be in trying to break it. The only real solution is to turn the sytem on its head. Instead of challenging the students to ever cleverer methods of cheating, challenge them to higher standards of honesty.
My alma mater [caltech.edu] had a very simple honor system, and it worked very well. Anonymous surveys showed that the level of cheating was substantially lower than at schools that tried the other way. This was despite the fact that almost all of the exams were take home. When the professor told students that there was a 3 hour time limit and it was closed book, people listened and obeyed even though there was nobody looking over their shoulder. It was great because we got the freedom to take our tests where and when we wanted to. Of course you could be expelled for cheating (that wasn't a guarantee, but it was a possibility) but very few people were.
Re:I've said it so many times... (Score:2)
I loved that particular aspect of life as a Caltech undergrad.
Things got a lot more depressingly Orwellian when I went somewhere else for grad school.
I think giving students power and responsibility is one of the best lessons you can give.
Canned response to English instructor: (Score:5, Funny)
The Closed Source Paper (Score:5, Funny)
"That's right, it's closed source and encrypted, but you can ask me questions about it, which I may or may not answer."
"Umm.."
Re:Canned response to English instructor: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody is going to arrest you for plagarism, it just weakens the structure of intellectual society and is therefore a good way to get blacklisted (or kicked out of school). Unethical-- but not illegal.
-m
Re:Canned response to English instructor: (Score:2)
Plagarism? That's preposturous! That paper was licensed under the GPL! I had every right to copy it and modify a few words here and there, as long as I made the paper available to others...
Copying? That's insane! My dissertation complied with the GNU Public License! I was entitled to duplicate while slightly changing the contents, as long as I ensured that the dissertation could be read by other individuals.
The question is simple (Score:5, Interesting)
If Yes:
Then he has the right to transer ownership to this site. And the student has already given up all rights.
If No:
Then he does not have , and any contract between him and site are void. If I submit "War And Peace" is does not mean the site now owns it, as I don't have any rights to the document.
Academic Ownership (Score:2, Insightful)
For the most part, academic works act as though they are open source. Certianly people are given credit for their ideas (through notation and citation), and they must be referenced in a bibliography or works cited if their ideas are used, but anything published is considered fair game for adaption, criticism, and use as support for someone else's ideas. Without such permissions, academic development could not occur because students would not be permitted to make use of the ideas they learned.
I think these freedoms come from the way academic work values the work itself, rather than money. If I write open source software that is virtually the same as another program, with no valuable modifications, then the community would not give a damn. The same is true of academic work - I could rewrite Plato's Republic and nobody would see it as valuable. But, if I rewrote it with interesting new insights and modifications, that is valued. In software development, the focus is (usually) on profit and commercialism rather than on superior products. Listen to the economists - better software comes from competition that stems from the desire to accumulate money. In academic disciplines, wealth is defined by contributions to the community, to the discipline. Much like open source software.
Re:The question is simple (Score:2)
Trust ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The level of what trust ? Trust that the students can be sure their papers will be run through turnitin.com ? Trust that their teachers don't trust them to turn honest papers in ?
This turnitin.com thing sounds all about cashing in on distrust to me, frankly.
Re:Trust ?? (Score:2)
Remember that we live in an age when the university gets sued by students and/or their parents if they feel they are being accused falsely. With these sites, it's easy to gather such obvious evidence that even the most irrational parents and the most bratty students shut the hell up. So, we instructors feel like we have a safety net, like we don't need to go out on a limb or to make judgement calls. I'm pretty happy about that.
Where in their user agreement? (Score:2)
Re:Where in their user agreement? (Score:2, Informative)
PERSONAL AND NONCOMMERCIAL USE LIMITATION
This web site is for your personal and noncommercial use. You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from this web site. A user may not market, rent, lease, or re-license the licensed programs or services, or use the licensed programs or services for third party commercial use, commercial timesharing, or service bureau use.
COPYRIGHT AND TRADEMARK NOTICES:
All contents of this web site are: Copyright (c) 1998-2001 iParadigms, LLC, iParadigms Corporation and/or its suppliers.
Re:Where in their user agreement? (Score:2)
Re:Where in their user agreement? (Score:2)
Of course they keep a copy -- how else are they going to recognize it when you sell it to someone else next year? And if their program finds possible plagiarism, they should send the allegedly matching paper to the professor to verify whether it really was plagiarized.
So to make this work, they have to keep the papers and make limited copies, but they should not be exposing the papers themselves on the web. So are submitted papers "contents of this web site"? And if they are claiming that, since the copyright hasn't been explicitly transferred, do they have to right to even hold a copy, let alone send it out to professors at other schools if it happens to match new submissions? The "Policy" seems to cover too much and too little.
They need to hire a lawyer that actually understands what they are doing.
The "no warrantee to the accuracy of the service" clauses are pretty understandable. Without that, every student who'd been smart enough to rephrase a few sentences would be suing them. To stay out of lawsuits, they aren't about to deliver a final judgement as to whether plagiarism has occurred, but simply report that two papers resemble each other and let the teachers figure out whether the resemblance is sufficient to support an accusation of plagiarism. If the prof doesn't compare the papers for himself, then they want it damned clear that you sue the prof and the school, not them...
Placebo? (Score:2, Insightful)
A panacea is a 'cure-all'. A placebo is a fake cure for something. Sure, this guy probably thinks the service is fake, but I believe he was trying to say that this service considers ittself a cure-all for plagiarism.
Panacea, not Placebo (Score:5, Insightful)
Placebo is the opening of a part of the Latin vesper
service for the dead, and it also means "something done to placate or please someone." But its use in medicine--"a harmless, unmedicated dose
or pill given a patient who insists on a treatment that the physician believes
is not needed"--is its most frequently used sense, occasionally confused with panacea. In medical experiments, a placebo is the nondrug given the control group in order that the effectiveness of the drug being given the other patients can be assessed more accurately.
SOURCE: http://www.bartleby.com/68/92/4392.html
(lest I be accused of plagiarism myself)
Re:Panacea, not Placebo (Score:2)
The placebo effect in action. That's what I originally thought the article was about. turnitin.com should also have a rate at which schools can *claim* that they use their services.
My Highschool (Score:5, Insightful)
The Cost: Its expensive, I don't know how much it costs but its money. This means that money is being spent to catch the dishonest instead of helping the honest. Arguably there is benefit to the honest when the dishonest are caught but the level of benefit pales in comparison to what could be achieved if the money was directly spent on the honest students.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence. I realize its not the court of law but it just seems wrong to me.
Re:My Highschool (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the website, it runs $0.50/student/year. My guess is that they price it cheaply, since schools don't have much money, and since it helps them build a database for comparisions faster.
Wonder what would happen if you put a copyright notice (not a GPL copyleft) that specifically disallowed submission to this service? Oh yeah, you'd get squished like a bug. Students rank lower than ants at American public schools.
Re:My Highschool (Score:2)
I think that 50 cents is better spent eliminating plagiarism than being spent on the honest students. What are you going to do, buy them a few pencils every year with it?
There's also the question of, how do you know who the honest students are in the first place?
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence. I realize its not the court of law but it just seems wrong to me.
If you turn in a paper that is almost identical to one someone else turned in, then there's a problem. I really don't see the problem everyone has with this; plagiarism is a big problem, and I've known plenty of people who had absolutely no moral qualms about doing this sort of thing. If they get caught, good; I put a lot of work into the papers I wrote, and I don't want my degree to be deprecated because half the people with it are semiliterate.
Re:My Highschool (Score:2)
That is definitely a bad policy. Note that turnitin.com makes no warrantee as to accuracy -- that means, the teachers better check the results for themselves, or you sue them and your boneheaded administrators, not turnitin. This is quite proper, because apparently turnitin just runs a program against a database; at a reasonable cost, they cannot keep a staff of subject-matter experts to verify whether alleged matches are actually plagiarism.
Re:My Highschool (Score:2)
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Let's address these. First of all, put yourself in the shoes of a teacher. Look, we all KNOW you (or bare minimum a substantial fraction of you) are cheating. Any teacher that thinks differently is absolutely blind. As a student you may have no idea of the extent of the problem. The other issue is that, as a teacher, there is nothing but trouble for you catching people. The burden of proof is quite high, and the administration is virtually never willing to back you to the hilt. By this I mean, any student caught cheating should be expelled and forced to pay for a semester of education to be re-instated.
It undermines the entire purpose of the system. As a teacher, you want to give FAIR grades. You want better students to be recognized for their achievements.
So suppose I, as a teacher, use turnitin. Now, I've dealt with one problem - the burden of proof. I suspect that turnitin has a reasonable check if a school is willing to stand behind it. Make no mistake about it no school would stand behind turnitin like this if if were not accurate to greater than 1 in a million cases. I say this because there will be lawsuits, Turnitin will be required to present matching papers, and a jury will have to weigh the evidence.
As I said, the burden for proof for the teacher is enormous.
Now, for the other issue, the cost. No educational system can fairly rank its students with widespread cheating as exists today. Catching student who cheat should be easy, and the cost is well worth it. Now, when a teacher hands out an A, he can look that student in the eye, praise him or her, and think highly of the ability of that student.
You have little idea what it is like to be a teacher and hand out grades without any knowledge of the relative competence of the students. It absolutely sucks.
Big deal (Score:2, Funny)
TWW
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
A placebo? (Score:2, Funny)
Not only in universities.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I told my teacher this and she seemed unconcerned. So I am planning to meet with the higher ups to show them the problem with the system.
By the way, my school's website can be found here Saint Xavier High School. [saintx.com]. I can't wait until graduation comes and I can get out of that place. Anyone who says single gender education is a good thing should be smacked silly.
Re:Not only in universities.... (Score:2)
But it also seemed to me that the teachers subscribe to the service and submit the papers. Maybe I misunderstood... do you actuall submit your own work and then somehow send the report to the teacher?
What the odds... (Score:2)
"Give us your work. We'll use it to make sure no is using it (without paying us first)"
Maybe not, but I'd get a kick and a chuckle out of it...
One way to avoid accusations of plagiarism... (Score:4, Funny)
I know, there's a risk the professor might actually read your paper and discover that you're illiterate, but it's a pretty slim risk...
...'cause most professors just toss the papers down a staircase, and grade 'em based on distance.
What if I want people to plagerize my work? (Score:2)
Somebody is losing out on compensation here. Someone call the RIAA, MPAA or something like that...
Turnitin doesn't own your work (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the confusion comes from the phrase, "our exclusive database of submitted papers." That doesn't imply that Turnitin has exclusive rights to the papers, only that nobody else can search their database.
Re:Turnitin doesn't own your work (Score:2)
The other side of the coin... (Score:2, Funny)
This should be discouraged... (Score:2)
1. As mentioned in the story, turnitin.com [turnitin.com] acquires copyright of the content. I've read the license and nowhere do they guarantee that they shall not misuse content that's been uploaded. (Although they do prohibit any other person from using others' content... that'd be interesting actually, they'd be party to the plagiarizing!)
2. Part of the license also says that the content can be used by the US Government, particularly by a defense related agency. That only means, that the CIA could come snooping in on innocuous content and the next thing you know, they'd start suspecting us of treason and subterfuge.
Surely, any university worth its name in salt can come up with some kind of a plagiarism-detecting software system. Or better still... maybe someone could come up with an Open Source version of turnitin.com's software. What say guys?
What the Hell? (Score:2, Insightful)
code around it. (Score:2)
but i don't plagiaise, i'm not in school, and i've other things to do than race towards a placebo for plagiarists, or even panacea for plagiarists.
Re:code around it. (Score:2)
Unless you perfected AI a couple minutes before your post, and I didn't hear about it yet.
Rights? (Score:2)
Students don't seem to have rights any more. They are more or less a commodity used to pad out a spreadsheet.
--saint
Trust relationship with students? (Score:3, Informative)
Teachers are not paid nearly enough for what they are worth, so do I blame them for using a service like this? Not really. There are potential disasters, where something is tagged as plagiarism when it is not, but that is a process issue that could be overcome with the teaching administration.
Accusations of plagiarism (Score:2)
There could very likely be false positives. There would probably have to be to some extent. It can't look for perfect matches, as simply changing the name would be enough to thwart that detection. And if it matches too closely, any common phrase of more than seven or eight words, while somewhat unlikely, is certainly not beyond the realm of reason. Any legitimate quoting could set this off easily.
It would also be difficult to detect the student who did a little bit of work and paraphrased the paper. While all the topics, references, and issues would be the same, the entire paper would be written with different words, and a simple grep would be practically useless. And you can't exactly do matches on topic, since likely that much WOULD be in common between the two papers.
Likely the service is in place to detect the obvious cheaters. And since it and other similar systems seem to be finding quite a few, its probably not unjustified. Even more so when hoardes of the accused don't come up screaming about it later.
-Restil
Turnitin.com central to Kansas cheating scandal (Score:5, Interesting)
Also this morning's Morning Edition [npr.org]
Essentially, a biology teacher in Kansas used the free trial of this site to check the final projects of her 110 HS sophmore students. She found 28 had cheated on the project, and thus gave them zero's, which meant they all failed her class. One of the parents of the cheaters raised cain with the school board, which instructed the teacher to reverse her grading decision. The teacher resigned rather than make the change.
What does this all mean? Fear not. Stupid school boards will alway defend the rights of cheaters!
Re:Turnitin.com central to Kansas cheating scandal (Score:2)
The Rights of the Student (Score:2)
Simple. Students have a right to not submit their work to turnitin.com. They cannot claim ownership of papers that have not been submitted to them.
If a student's instructor submits the paper to turnitin.com, I do not see how they can claim ownership. Simply put, my instructor can't give up my property rights. Only I can do that. This follows along the same lines as my friends not being able to give away my car.
I don't really see a problem here. If you don't like their TOS, don't use them. The Free Market economy will take care of the rest.
output of MSFT source code turitin run :-) (Score:3, Funny)
23% match with BSD
32% match with Apple OS
34% match with DEC VMS
16% match with Borland
Summary:
112% matches with other source bases (indicates
mutual plagarism)
0% original code
Can't be (Score:2)
0% of original code
How can you code so many security holes in 0 lines of code?
For once, I'm on the side of the devils (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: During my career I've been a university professor and a corporate training in many occasions; my views are tempered by these experiences.
I don't advocate the use of turnitin.com or any other service in catching students "cheating" on their papers. When I was both a student I was taught that acquiring analytical and synthesis skills are the purposes of a university education. Based on that principle, my best teachers were the ones who based their grades on analysis, synthesis, or some measurable activity (hands-on project, test) rather than "a paper". I tried carrying forward with this tradition during my career.
I believe that a service like turnitin.com is an insult to both students and teachers. The students will always find a way to break the rules. The teachers will become lazy and complacent. The service is extremely easy to be defeated if you just use some common sense and some non-academic skills. Besides, grading a paper is a very subjective activity; what is excellent for one reader is rubbish for another (think moderation on /.).
One simple way of beating this service is to search the web for similar papers written in a different language, perhaps found on servers in other countries. If you were smart enough to learn at least one other language other than your native language, this opens a whole new WWW out there. A student who engages in a translation effort may find that (a) he will absorb some of the material in the process; and (b) will likely add his own spin to the paper.
I would advocate changing the teaching methods rather than resorting to a service like this. Reduce the emphasis on papers and increase it on teaching people how to think.
Flame on,
ERe:For once, I'm on the side of the devils (Score:2)
That's all well and good...except for English Composition classes where the entire point is to write compositions as a means of learning how to write. There is no other way to do it.
Then what about literature classes where you may be asked to expound upon some book or short story you've all read as part of the assignment? This is an area ripe for cheating and cheaters need to be REAMED. Reamed long, hard, and deep. Reamed with dry broomsticks.
There are simply some classes where the main means of learning and demonstrating learning is to write. They aren't going to go away (and shouldn't).
Re:For once, I'm on the side of the devils (Score:2)
praedor wrote:
That's all well and good...except for English Composition classes where the entire point is to write compositions as a means
of learning how to write. There is no other way to do it.
Then what about literature classes where you may be asked to expound upon some book or short story you've all read as
part of the assignment? This is an area ripe for cheating and cheaters need to be REAMED. Reamed long, hard, and deep.
Reamed with dry broomsticks.
There are simply some classes where the main means of learning and demonstrating learning is to write. They aren't going to
go away (and shouldn't).
Simple: Have your student write a 500-word essay in class from three or more topics related to the main subject. The student selects the topic from this menu. Writing a 500-word essay should take about 60-90 minutes.
Then again, when I was teaching and I suspected cheating, I usually let it slide. Cheating has a way of catching up with the cheater later in life. I know of a good example from one of my students, who passed (C+) a course by asking someone else to do her assignments for her. It was an advanced programming course. She was eaten alive when she went out to the real world and changed her career path from software engineer to web designer.
Cheers,
E
Necessary similarity. (Score:2)
For example, I'm taking an introductory programming course at the moment, and the lab exercises tend to be solvable in a few minutes with the rudimentary Java skills we've acquired. How many ways can there be to answer these simplistic questions? Won't there be a tremendous false positive rate from this sort of thing?
Just how many "implement an alarm clock class" answers can there really be?
--saint
Playing Both Sides? (Score:2)
Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted
If I ran a service like that, I'd be tempted to skim off some of the papers, say... 10%, and market them to students who need a "gauranteed A".
As for turnitin.com owning the paper, are you sure it's not a non-exclusive license? If it's a non-exclusive license to use, they are just protecting themselves. If it's an actual copyright transfer than I wouldn't stand for it. It would be interesting to see a bunch of warez-swapping, MP3 trading students standing up for IP protection. It doesn't feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot, does it? I mean, after all, it's not like you lose any money by letting turnitin.com have the paper. How many students sell their papers anyway? Yada, yada, yada, all the same old AIP arguments turned on their head...
Keep a copy or Ownership? (Score:2)
It similar to you giving someone a copy of a picture you took. They now own that copy, and can keep it, but it in no way gives them the right to reproduce it or do anything else with it, as they don't hold the copyright on it.
Re:Keep a copy or Ownership? (Score:2)
I think the general principle is devolving to "Everything is copyrighted. Everyone's copyright is inviolate. Oh, except yours."
Re:Keep a copy or Ownership? (Score:2)
Who owns the paper (Score:3, Insightful)
So, unless you specifically transfered the rights to the school, you still own th epaper - as an orginal work. It would be interesting to send a cease and desist letter to turnitin.com - demanding they remove all copies of your work from their database. Of course, it would take someoen with some moeny to enforce this and get a case to court, but wouldn't be interetsing if everystudent spent the 34cents to send them a "cease and desist" request. Some lawyer could even create a GPL'd one for them to cut and paste.
Re:Who owns the paper (Score:2)
Plagiarism by Coincidence (Score:2, Insightful)
Cheating IS a serious problem at my school (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems many, many students, in undergraduate and graduate programs alike, are not interested in learning to get the grade.
I have seen it in my of my classes; students turn in another student's program, with minor modifications to foil a cursory examination, as their own. Sometimes this is done across semesters to try to foil a deeper inspection.
So what is a university to do? It's not fair to other students that cheaters go by undetected. And if students urn in work from 2, 3 or 4 semesters ago, how is the teacher to detect it? That amount of data to scan is overwhelming - you can't do it by hand within a reasonable amount of time. Besides, doing so requires access to work in previous semesters.
A database is the only way to do something like this, and frankly, I applaud the approach. However, I think schools should keep their own databases. Sure, it wouldn't detect cheating from other schools, but it also ensures that the student's work (which does remain the property of the student, right?) is only kept to check for cheating.
It's a difficult problem, and of course not possible to solve completely. But I think these measures will cut down on the amount of cheating that goes undetected.
As someone who uses this in my class... (Score:2)
I teach at a US university, and I am quite sure that an instructor has the right to keep a copy of everything that is turned in by the students as a part of coursework. Nobody freaks out about this, nor thinks their rights are being violated. It is also my right to consult with my colleagues regarding an assignment that is turned in to me. This pagiarism service does nothing more than what has been going on legally, though on a much smaller scale, at out universities.
Oh, and about worries whether these online services might falsely accuse someone of plagiarism, only total ignorance of how this works could give rise to such an objection. It's not like they send you email saying "your plagiarism test came out positive, congratulations". What they do is send you references to all of the original sources which share identical sections of text with the paper being investigated. Then I, the instructor, must decide whether the overlap between the paper and the other source is a symptom of plagiarism or of something else.
I have collegues who send every paper they receive to these services, and they catch many cheaters. Because I don't do this I might have missed some (but I like to think my assignments are so specific to my course that anything which is a cut and paste from the internet will not look like an answer to my essay question). However, when I get a paper I am suspicious about, I quickly OCR it and send it to plagiarism.org. They do five free checks per email address, and then charge you $1 for every additional check, which my department would pay if I wanted them to. It's great to call a cheating bastard into my office hour when you have absolute proof they cheated. I tell them I suspect plagiarism, and give them a chance to withdraw their paper (most of my colleagues are not this kind). So far, only one has refused. When she did I quoted to her a long passage from a website, which was identical to a section of her paper. Then I asked her to not return to my class. She got an F and the fact that she broke the law was appended to her permament university record. In this case I was very happy that finding incontrovertible proof was so little work for me, because I have better stuff to do than to search around for original sources. If it weren't for the website, I still would have known that she cheated; a couple of probing questions about the text she turned would reveal that. Still, I might feel torn about the F and the permanent black mark, because there are some people who can write stuff they can't explain verbally. With proof, though, I didn't need to feel torn at all.
I think this is a great service... (Score:3, Interesting)
First, as others pointed out, just submitting the student's work doesn't transfer ownership, so there's no issue there.
Outside of that, it's good to know such a service exists, as long as it's used right. I think a major news story that surprisingly turns up few hits on news sites was a recent case of a biology class in Kansas. The teacher outlined the grading of the course from day 1, and stated that a term-long paper would be worth 50% of their grade. When she got the papers in (electronically), she ran them through turnitin , and found 20-some papers were possible plagiarized works. Because she stated that the work had to be the students' own, she immediately gave these 20-some students F's on the paper, and thus, failing the course. Parents of the students complained, and they somehow managed to get the school board to overturn the teacher's grading such that the paper was only worth 30% of the total grade, and those that failed the paper still managed to pass the course. The results have been tremendous. The teacher quit her job. The school board has been sued. The district is looking towards shrinking numbers as parents pull kids out to others. And, possibly most importantly, the students themselves, once identified with the school district, are getting unwanted 'discrimation'; on NPR this morning, for example, one student from the district taking the AP test in a different town was identified as being from the district due to her shirt, and the test moderator told her "Oh, you're from XXX? Don't cheat now.". This is a very bad stigma to leave high school with, and those that didn't cheat might find their education hampered. (A bit of the news story is at Yahoo [yahoo.com], though there's more than just this around.
Now, assuming I was in the same position, my first thing after seeing that turnitin reported that high a number would be to actually read the affected papers vs what the site said was being plagiarized. Not knowning the matching algorithm, there could be a lot of error, but assuming that it goes by long, equivalent phrases, there's a good change that it's not wrong. But spending the extra few hours to make sure that the site was correct would be absolutely necessary (I'm not sure if in this case the teacher did that. It sounds like she did double check as she was flabbergasted that that many students did cheat). I'd then confer with the principle or a similar figure to confirm the numbers (many schools do have a person to monitor cheating in the schools), and decide on the action. I think the teacher, assuming that the cheating was confirmed, did the right course of action and stuck to her guns. Could she have caught this without such a site, and assuming she didn't have sufficient programming skill to work out her own? Maybe, maybe not. I've done enough TA'ing that it's very hard on a problem set to detect cheating, but it can be found out. It gets even tougher using reports. Tools like this are very very helpful to find cheaters out. And it is necessary to do this, as cheaters can not only hurt themselves, but also their classmates' reputations as they progress through school.
So yes, it's a very good tool but like all other tools, it's only that. No tool is perfect and thus some human evaluation must be done to make sure the tool is right.
Panacaea (Score:2)
Too many SAT words [slashdot.org] make
Ownership of plagiarized paper? (Score:2)
They can't, it's not legal (Score:2)
They can't do that. It's not legal. It doesn't follow the proper protocols for copyright assignment. They don't receive full copyright to you work just because they say so somewhere in a hidden license annoucement.
To transfer copyright you must *explicitly* do so in a manner involving consideration, signatures, etc.
Slashdotted of courcse (Score:2)
An Educator's Point of View (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:An Educator's Point of View (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't use turnitin.com. Unless it was decreed by an administrator, I would never choose to use turnitin.com. The very concept violates the notion of an honor system that most universities employ. Academic integrity ought to be assumed, unless explicitly demonstrated otherwise. To screen all work for dishonesty presumes a probability of guilt. And while that may in fact be the reality (that is, probably, someone did cheat) you can't run a classroom that way. At least not a classroom where you hope to teach by establishing rapport, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility. A policy of using any apparatus that presumes low behavior establishes the expectation of low behaviors, which in turn (you guessed it) elicits low behavior. Academic work then turns into a resentful exercise of doing the least you can get away with to please the initimidator, rather than rising to the intellectual challenge.
Arguments of pragmatism do not hold. That is because the efficacy of an education is as much about the educational atmosphere as it is about holding students to a standard of integrity.
Now, the parent of this post describes about the only enlightened use of turnitin I can imagine. That is, using the service to check students' ability to synthesize third party ideas. There have been a couple cases of plagiarism I have been involved in where outright cheating was not as evident as the students' inability to communicate established ideas in a novel way. Novices have a very hard time breaking away from the efficiently-turned phraseology in a text book or other source. Often, the exact wording just gets stuck with them. There just isn't (in their mind) a better way to say it. These cases would be, in my mind, false positives of the turnitin system.
Unfortunately, using a system like turnitin on a case by case basis (i.e. employing it when a particular paper is suspicious) has as many counterarguments as using it systematically. That is, the accused can argue that potentially there are many other cheaters...he/she is being singled out because of his/her paper raised suspicion and was "processed" while other students' work was not.
Trading freedom for security is a popular theme in today's society. Arguments for/against face recognition systems, public CCTV cams, wiretapping, DNA banking, etc. are all grounded in very real concerns about safety and liberty. I'm not going to paraphrase Franklin's overused observation on the matter, but in the academy, the sociological impact of such choices is immediate and weighty. Students have been learning and cheating at institutions for centuries. A new method to efficiently cull out the lawbreakers makes life easier for the overburdened educators, but I would seriously doubt it heralds a new generation of better educated students. And THAT is the ultimate responsibility of any school.
Is this really necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a college professor, and while my area is mathematics and computer science, I have seen my share of cheating. Recently a student managed to steal a programming project from a student who was too liberal with write permissions on his account, and pass it off as his own.
Because of my experience at various universities, seeing what works and what does not, I have a draconian stance on honor policies. Suspend them on the first offense, expel them on the second (and even expel on the first if it is extreme enough). I say this, because this seems to be far more effective at reducing cheating than any tools you might have.
99% of all cheaters cheat poorly. The student above went through and modified all the comments and output statements, but forgot to remove the original student's name from the headers. These people are easy to catch and you do not need a service for them. Yes, it is a little harder with English and Philosophy papers, but by adding some unique flavor to your assignments (which you should do anyway), my colleagues can cut down on the material that they can copy.
The problem is prosecuting them. If you have a university with a weak honor code, students will cheat because they feel like they have nothing to lose. It is not enough to fail a cheater on the assignment -- he was going to fail anyway. Similarly, it is not enough to fail them in the course. You have to make the expected value of cheating horrendous.
And if the expected value is horrendous, all you have to do is catch those easy 99%. If students see others being caught and the sentences imposed, my experience has shown that the "casual cheaters" will think twice about cheating.
A students thoughts.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The school just announced the use of turnitin.com in the school paper about 2 weeks ago. I have no problem with the school fighting plagerism. The university has a strong policy on it actually and im normally in support of it. But ive had friends who (before turnitin.com) have been accused of plagerism. Now ive been there when they've written the papers and even advised on a few of them. But what turnitin does is definatly a big gray cloud over academia. Is the world so corrupt as a company can make some $$ on this? unfortunatly yes. Is this going to hurt schools and their respective charges... namely students? yes. From my knowledge of copyright, anything that i put down in a tangeble format ( a paper for instance) is instantly protected under copyright law in the USA. As long as i put some originality into the effort that work becomes mine. You are allowed to quote given that you cite your work. When you dont cite, its just being a bad student. Now everyone misses things here and there. When i do research for a paper i may not use everything that ive read. So when im actually writing, a phrase or line that ive read may come up and im either a)not going to remember exactly where it came from (yes, i do that much research and thus alot of reading) or b) it sounded good somewhere else and it remained in my subconscience. Everyone retains certain phrases/actions/patterns that they pick up from different places. Ever notice that you start saying things your mom or dad said when you were a kid? same thing. Ill think that ive come up with a decent approach at something when it may have already been used. Does that make me guilty of plagerism if i honestly dont remember dealing with the same phrase during research?
There are too many gray areas for this debate to be ended anytime soon. From now on im making sure to put the copyright symbol on all my work and making it clear to my teachers that my work is my work. Any unauthorized use of it is copyright violation. I may even go so far as to have them sign an agreement that they will only use my paper for grading purposes and that anything beyond that requires my written permission. that means that any attempt to store, modify or transfer my paper to any other entity be it teacher or turnitin.com becomes a legal issue. Its not that i dont trust my teachers. I love them (yes my friends are laughing at me for this.) I have no desire to see any harm but i do need to protect my rights. NO i dont cheat but i dont want to be involved in something that has legal problems written all over it.
From the creators of Turnitin.com (Score:5, Informative)
1. We respect all of your comments. We stand behind the free flow of information.
2. Turnitin was created by educators to solve an important problem in academia: intellectual property theft (see #10, below). .
3. The technology was developed at U.C. Berkeley as a tool to allow students to Peer Review each others' manuscripts (see BARRIE, J.M. AND PRESTI, D.E. The WWW as an instructional tool. Science, 274(5286): 371-372, 1996.). The original idea concerned collaborative learning. .
4. Turnitin should only be used as a deterrent to plagiarism and not as a tool to catch cheaters (in fact, I believe the latter to be a misuse of our technology). .
5. Turnitin only 'sources-out' a manuscript. It does not determine whether or not a paper was actually plagiarized; that is left to the faculty member. .
6. Turnitin helps an instructor to insure that their students are all playing by the same set of rules (not unlike a football or basketball referee). It levels the playing field. .
7. Technology similar to Turnitin has been used in computer science departments (whether you know it or not) for over a decade. .
8. All work submitted to Turnitin remains the property of the author. .
9. According to the Fair Use clause of the US Copyright Act, Turnitin makes a transformative use (and therefore Fair Use) use of the original work which does not violate the intellectual property rights of the author. .
10. Final thought, "A person's published words are the product of a great deal of training, thought, and effort. To represent another's thoughts as one's own is at best misrepresentation. Plagiarism is a substitute for writing, and so a substitute for thinking. At worst, it is theft of intellectual property, and therefore represents a serious challenge to the integrity of academia" - Dr. Michael M. Todd.
We respect the ideas and concerns discussed in this Slashdot thread.
Violating their own TOS (Score:5, Informative)
Also call me critical, but the Copyright Act since 1976 has provided that a copyright attaches AUTOMATICALLY when a work is fixed in a medium, regardless of whether a copyright notice is affixed. If this company is keeping copies of papers submitted by professors for use in their future searches, IMHLO (L = Legal) they have created a derivative work in violation of the student's copyright. The Professor's submitting to the site is an act of contributory infringement. Can anyone say "class action lawsuit" ?
Re:Placebo? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Placebo? (Score:2, Troll)
Not to mention that the student's work is now being used without approval by a site in a manner that the student might not approve of. I for one don't want someone else using my work for gain without my permission. This is not personal use, this is a site for gain.
Re:Placebo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Placebo? (Score:2)
I see absolutely no problem with this, and so far no one has cited the dreaded property clause, either. This looks like a fine service.
Re:well obviously (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:well obviously (Score:2, Interesting)
The question is whether the teacher owns the paper (technically, the copyright thereof) or not. If the teacher doesn't own the paper, then they can't give up your rights to it (otherwise all copyrights on mp3s would no longer exist once they had been shared a couple of times...). If the teacher does own the paper, then this would be legal, but I wonder if the school system would always want to be doing this.
I'm betting that the teacher doesn't own the paper, except perhaps in very special circumstances that qualify as "work for hire". But for the average term paper, the student wrote it, and what you write is automatically (c) you.
Re:well obviously (Score:2, Interesting)
no it's not. If I take a class then, unless i sign a contract to the contrary, my work belongs to me. I'd like to see them try and sue me over the matter. For that matter, i wouldn't mind seeing a lawsuit brought when turnitin.com publishes a compendium of essays.
Re:well obviously (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me (Score:4, Informative)
The trick is, when papers are submitted to be checked, Turnitin.com is claiming ownership of the paper without the consent of the author since the teacher is the one who submitted it.
Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me (Score:2)
panacea, noun: a remedy for all ills or difficulties : CURE-ALL
(Definition plagiarized from Mirriam-Webster)
Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me (Score:3, Interesting)
because students use the service themselves FIRST and then change their paper until it passes.
I can't get to the site now to see how this works, but there must be a switch that says "don't add the paper I'm checking to your database" otherwise this would never work. Each of their changes would be recorded and show up as something similar to the submitted paper. And the paper that didn't get any hits would be added to the database, so that when the professor checked it, the paper turned in would come up as an exact match of the last paper checked by the student.
Could somebody who actually got to the site elaborate?
No, really, what are they talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No, really, what are they talking about? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Question (Score:2)
Re:It's illegal (IANAL) (Score:2, Interesting)
In their privacy policy it states:
"Access to personal information by third parties will only occur via signed consent by registered users as stated in our registration agreement."
Followed by...
"Student personal information is used for upload identification, market research or statistical purposes only."
So technically, if they release that information, without your consent, then it's a violation.
Hypothetically speaking though, if someone shares your personal information with our without your consent, is that plagarizing?
Re:Why is everything a 'Disturbing Trend'? (Score:2)
woof.
Yeah, go on and mod it as Off-Topic. It's a Karma-cap perk (or perq[uisite], if you wish). I left the +1 Score because I agree with the parent -- I'm sick of all these hackneyed phrases, too. They seem to be about 50% of the content of any student paper I've ever had the displeasure of reading, so now I'm back on-topic and Insightful, as well. Even more Insightful when you consider that the use of the same tired phrases, jargon and pseudo-English business-speak will result in a lot of positive results for "plagiarism". I'm guessing they're using some simple heuristics to defeat bad spelling, and if that ain't Interesting, what is? (I mean besides shoving a cheap hub up a stuffed animal's ass [slashdot.org].)
Re:NPR is running this now (Score:2)
Re:So, what then, was the problem? (Score:2)
Re:Plagiarism is typically easy to spot... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you. I have been a TA at a US university and at a British university and I am afraid that TA'ing undergraduate humanities courses was painful. I would very quickly and easily identify candidates because they would:
Catching them was as easy as falling off a log. I would follow up the initial noting of a suspicious paper with a couple of different web searches. It was rare that some dumbass hadn't taken massive chunks of someone else's work and tried to pass if off as his/her own.
I am very happy that I caught these people whom I would otherwise have declared to the University were the equivalent of the majority of my students who were working damn hard to make their grades. Some people that were busting their balls were only making C's and if some cheating, dishonest little swine was able to get the same or superior mark by lying then that would be wrong.
I don't know if you've read some of the comments further down the page from "tiri" et al, but you may be disheartened if you do.