Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education

Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse? 394

Posted by Cliff from the why-don't-corps-understand-the-concept-of-personal-IP? dept.
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?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse? More

Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse?

Comments Filter:

  • Sweet! (Score:2, Funny)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 )
    I'm turning in a paper that was blatantly plagiarised so I can get my sugar pill!
  • I can tell you that if turnitin.com is anything like slashdot, they'll just mod the paper into oblivion if it doesn't jive with the editors' opinions [slashdot.org]. But hey, what do I know?

  • GPL'd papers .... obvious plagarism ..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:48PM (#3107832) Homepage Journal
    there's that same big block of legaese at the beginning that will trigger the filter every time :-)

  • I've said it so many times... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gogl ( 125883 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:50PM (#3107854) Journal
    Cheating will always happen.

    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.
    • Ah yes, but there is another side to it. College is also about the piece of paper you get at the end, and also, what institution's name is on said paper. This, in fact, is the most important thing to the institution: their name. If they allow cheating (and say for the sake of argument that these are equvalent, so they can either allow cheating or use this service) then their reputation goes down, versus other institutions. When this happens, their status and cash goes down.

      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.
      • I agree with you. An institution's reputation for allowing plagiarism will devalue the worth of all degrees awarded by it.

        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
      • You make it sound like it's the prime priority of a university to protect its reputation. Why would you think that? I think it's the prime priority of a university to educate its students. If they coast through by cheating, they're not taking the time to have their own thoughts, and when that happens, we fail as educators.
    • it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.


      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.

    • "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." Most of my Engineering classes were graded on a curve... so if you can cheat your way to setting the curve, then you ARE hurting other people.

    • Colleges can be hurt by cheating (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GroundBounce ( 20126 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:41PM (#3108329)
      it is very true that when you cheat the only person you're really hurting is yourself.

      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.

    • 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.


    • 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.

      • 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)

    by cscx ( 541332 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:52PM (#3107870) Homepage
    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...

    • The Closed Source Paper (Score:5, Funny)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:57PM (#3107942) Homepage Journal
      "I can't read your term paper, son."

      "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.."

    • Note (not to ruin the joke) that plagarism is not a crime. It doesn't refer to copyright violation (which is a crime) but to dishonesty. Plagarism occurs when an author implicitly asserts that something is new and original work and it is not. It is even possible to self-plagarize (this happens a lot in scientific circles) by claiming the same work is new in two different places. Students who insert sections of a highschool report they wrote into their freshman college paper are guilty of this.

      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

    • 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)

    by JohnHegarty ( 453016 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:52PM (#3107871) Homepage
    1) Does the tutor/lecture own the document.

    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)

      by ragmana ( 562405 )
      The ownership of student academic work, or of academic work in general, usually varies by discilpine. For example, in Philosophy MOST academics will allow others to reprint their works gratis - it's often considered "bad form" not to, because everyone expects reciprocity in this regard. In other disciplines, such a system would be treated as absurd. In some sciences, people who help with papers are given co-authorship for minimal involvement. In other disciplines a "thanks for the help" is considered sufficient.

      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.

  • Trust ?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jesse Duke ( 559062 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:52PM (#3107872)
    From the website : "[...] The level of trust in my classroom has gone up 100 percent, [...]"

    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.

    • No, the idea is that as instructors, we don't have to take leaps of faith. When the website finds plagiarism, there's no guesswork involved anymore.

      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.

  • It would help if someone can find the line/paragraph in question and post it. I can't. Anyway, I will never GPL my paper to protect it.

    • The site description says that teachers can come to "their own turnitin.com Report Inbox" to review submitted assignments. So the reports become part of turnitin.com. From the usage policy [turnitin.com]: starting at the second paragraph:

      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.

      • perhaps the slashdot crowd needs to learn to read or perhaps I need to learn to read. Our we seriously misreading the agreement? I still don't see them claiming that all submitted papers are now owned by them. "All contens of this web site are coprrighted ... and or ITS SUPPLIERS" sounds more like their own content or copyrighted by whoever supplied it!

        • From Cliff:

          Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every student paper submitted and students have no choice in this matter.


          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)

    by Spazntwich ( 208070 )
    I wonder if they mean panacea.

    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)

    by vaxer ( 91962 ) <sylvar@NOSpAm.vaxer.net> on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:53PM (#3107882) Homepage
    A panacea is a magical cure for all diseases and hence, figuratively, a magical solution to any and all problems. Most uses of the word occur in denials of or questions about a panacea's worth or existence.


    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)

  • My Highschool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by darthBear ( 516970 ) <`hactar' `at' `hactar.org'> on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:53PM (#3107883)
    The history department at my highschool also uses turnitin.com. I certainly don't advocate plagerism but I have a couple of issues with it.

    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)

      by sysadmn ( 29788 )
      The Cost: Its expensive, I don't know how much it costs but its money.

      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.
    • 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.
      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.
    • The school has adopted a policy that if turnitin.com catches plagerism you must prove your innocence.

      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.
    • The history department at my highschool also uses turnitin.com. I certainly don't advocate plagerism but I have a couple of issues with it. The Cost: Its expensive...
      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)

    by nagora ( 177841 )
    Of course they keep a copy of every paper, that's how they check for plagarism! What did you think they did use the md5 hash cross-indexed with a Tarot reading?

    TWW

    • Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)

      by erasmus_ ( 119185 )
      They can hold on to it for checking, sure, but why should it become their property? I don't think the company is malicious in this case, just needs to clarify its TOS and what it can/cannot do with papers - ie "we reserve right to hold on to them for verification in database, but we will not attempt to republish them or make any other revenue or claims to ownership on them."
  • You mean it doesn't actually check anything, it just makes you think it has?

  • Not only in universities.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dragon218 ( 139996 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @04:59PM (#3107956) Homepage
    I'm a senior in a "college-prep" Catholic high school, and the English teachers at my school found this website and started using it. The first thing that I did after performing the mandatory account creation was to read the guidelines. It did say that they keep all student papers that were submitted in their database, then later on they go on to say that anything on their site is copyright them.

    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.

    • The part about everything on their site being copyrighted by them looked to me like just the standard copyright satement applies to material they publish on their site. I don't think they say that the papers in their database belong to them.

      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?
  • Who's willing to put down some money that TurnItIn.com is the front end to a research paper selling service?

    "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)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:03PM (#3107993) Homepage
    ...misspell your BigWords. Pretty darn tough to get caught if, for instance, you use "placebo" when you really mean "panacea."

    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.
  • Can't I say that I do not license turnitin.com to use my work as a test bed for their commercial service. Also how do I know that my copyrighted works are being used without fee in their service? Shouldn't I be able to charge turnitin.com for using my "document" as a reference?

    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)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug@RABBIT ... minus herbivore> on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:06PM (#3108027) Homepage
    Where does it say that? After careful reading of the agreement I can't find any reference to Turnitin owning the submitted papers. That idea doesn't make sense anyway, because the students don't subscribe to the service or submit their papers; the instructors do. There's no way a student loses any rights to a paper just because an instructor uploads it somewhere.

    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.
    • "That idea doesn't make sense anyway, because the students don't subscribe to the service or submit their papers; the instructors do."
      For the one class at RIT where we had to use Turnitin.com (a distance learning class), the student's *did* turn the papers in themselves. I believe we all used a single account to turn in the assignments. It was obvious from the design of the pages that this was how the service was meant to be used, at least for how it was configured for our school.
  • You can take plagerized texts, run it through this software and then keep tweeking it until it no longer sets off the filter alarm.
  • chiefly for two reasons:

    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?
  • How are they ever supposed to build a database of papers if they don't keep a copy of ones that are submitted? It seems like if one wants to prevent plagiarism, one needs to have something to check it against? And why would you ever need to check it for plagiarism if you're the one who wrote it... seems like you want to find out if it's within the limits or not... I think it's a great tool for profs/TA's who are suspicious and want to start a process... I recommended the site to my mom (University prof) a while back.
  • a while back [blackant.net] i thought it would be nice to code up a little website that would take your paper full of plagiarised statements and transform it into a somewhat grammatically and logically similar (though not recognizably plagiarised) statement. use thesaurus lookups and statement restructuring to hopefully get the same idea across, but in a different enough way that turnitin.com wouldn't catch it.

    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.

    • It would come out like a bad babelfish sitting in a car in the middle of summer in Texas.

      Unless you perfected AI a couple minutes before your post, and I didn't hear about it yet. :)
  • Where are the rights of the student?

    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)

    by gosand ( 234100 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:12PM (#3108082)
    Sorry, but my fiancee just got done with her Masters, and taught at a university for 3 years. She taught foreign language classes, and told the students - Do not use internet translators. They did. All the time. Some students would get Fs on their papers, because they used a translator, and the next paper - translated on the internet. There is no trust because students are stupid and lazy. All of them? No. But those are the ones that stand out, and the ones that are the reason that companies like turnitin.com exist. Teachers would have to treat all papers the same, or face the accusation of preferential treatment. So it is either all or nothing, and I understand why teachers would use this service.

    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.

  • If a service accuses you of plagiarism, it is up to an actual human being to then compare the student's work to the suspected document to be sure. To simply accuse someone without supporting evidence is asking for trouble.

    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)

    by bedmison ( 534357 ) <808&music,vt,edu> on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:25PM (#3108189)
    Check out this story [kansascity.com] from the Kansas City Star.

    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!

    • Well, we know the Kansas school board really knows their biology. After all, that's why Kansas is such an education leader: the first to teach Creationism instead of the theory of evolution. I sure hope that these fine judgement calls by the Kansas school board continue. In fact, I wish these people would just take over. Then, we could get rid of atheistic science alltogether, give everyone school uniforms (burkas for women!), punish pre-marital sex, and make illegal anything that violates the teachings of the One Great Religion. Bless Kansas!
  • Where are the rights of the student?

    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)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:29PM (#3108218)
    17% match with CP/M
    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

  • For once, I'm on the side of the devils (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ciurana ( 2603 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:44PM (#3108344) Homepage Journal

    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,

    E

    • 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).


      • 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
  • One thing I haven't seen anyone post about this is the problem of trying to detect cheaters in a very basic class.

    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

  • 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...

  • Of course the site is /.ed, so I can't get on and read their terms of service myself, but do they say they keep a copy of the paper, or that they own the paper (or something along those lines)? If all they say is that they keep a copy of the paper, that in no way changes the copyright or ownership of the paper. It doesn't give them the right to reproduce or distribute it in any way. Basically, they are saying they are keeping a copy of the paper to add to their database, in case someone copies this paper in the future. If they claim ownership or copyright of the paper, then there is a problem.

    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.
    • If it's not you, but someone else like your professor or the academic institution "giving" a copy and turnitin.com keeping a copy, they're in violation of copyright. More annoying, they're violating your copyright in order to make money by using your work. This is no different than Sun loaning me a copy of the MS Win XP CDs and my making a copy to keep, then giving the CDs back. Aside from some vague handwaving where universities often claim rights over student's work, which is truly bizarre. I'm paying you to teach me, therefore all I create in the process belongs to you. Hmm. No.


      I think the general principle is devolving to "Everything is copyrighted. Everyone's copyright is inviolate. Oh, except yours."

    • But they are USING the paper for commercial gain without the consent of the copyright holder. Which places them and the instructor who submitted it on the wrong side of the legal coin.

  • Who owns the paper (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:48PM (#3108393)
    IANAL, but as I understand copyright law, unless you sell the rights, or do a work for hire, you own the copyright - wether or not you mark the paper with the appropriate symbols. Failing to copyright may limit your damages to recover, but doesn't result in loss of ownership.

    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.
    • Another thought - do they keep copie sof other (non-students) original work for comparision? If so, would that violate copyright protections (and evn possibly, could be - the DMCA?) After all, I can't copy music from the net and keep it on my server - why should someone be able to copy written works for their own benefit?

  • It seems to me like the larger the database gets the more likely it will be that your honest paper will get pegged to someone elses honest paper. If they have a database of say, 10 million papers, then it's conceivable that your paper will be similar to someone elses by sheer coincedence. In that case, will your work instantly be labled plagiarism? What about professors that don't bother to really compare the results of the search, and automatically fail anyone who the website indicates has a plagiarized paper? I smell lawsuits brewing.

  • Cheating IS a serious problem at my school (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @05:54PM (#3108437)
    Every class has a disclaimer presented to the student at the beginning of the semester, that cheating will not be tolerated if detected.

    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.
  • Look, I don't think you guys need to freak out about this. TurnItIn reserves only the right to archive and search through all the stuff that's turned in to them. They can't publish it or sell it--so it's not like they take over all the rights to your work. As someone else has pointed out, how would they catch cheaters unless they could compare their work with the others? This would be impossible if they didn't keep the old papers on file.

    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)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:11PM (#3108630)
    ...as long as it's used correctly.

    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.

  • I guess the poster/editors felt that they couldn't use the word twice in one day.
    Too many SAT words [slashdot.org] make /. readers brains hurt.
  • If a student submits a paper that was copied illegally, the student was never the rightful owner. How can turnitin.com now claim ownership?
  • If you read their terms of use it appears that students papers become the property of Turnitin.com.

    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.
  • ... but when it's back up I had better find a way to see if any of my work is being used on their site. I will then tell them to either remove it or start paying me. I'm not to thrilled that they are using MY work to make a profit.

  • An Educator's Point of View (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tiri ( 564073 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:23PM (#3108723)
    I'm a professor of writing and rhetoric at a major university English Department that has a subscription to Turnitin.com. I've used the service during its testing phase at our institution, and I have serious questions about the ethics of its use for many of the reasons that others have mentioned. For example, I would never ask all my students to submit all their papers through the service. I believe that the site should only retain papers for the purposes of comparison in their database and that this statement should be made explicitly in their terms. However, the developers of Turnitin.com have been responsive in the past. When educators raise ethical objections to the requirement that an SSN must be attached to any paper submitted, they removed this requirement from teacher submissions, which can now be anonymous. It is possible that they will be responsive to the concerns raised here, particularly if educators using the sites (like me) bring their concerns to the developers' attention. My guess is that the discussion here has gotten their attention since I can't log on to my account at the moment. In spite of the problems I have with the idea of plagiarism-hunting by faculty and administration (a pastime that seems rampant on my campus), I do find that there are pedagogically and ethically defensible uses of sites such as this. For example, I have submitted papers that I thought were plagiarized when I could not locate the original source material in a reasonable period of time. In all but one case, the papers were plagiarized in the technical sense of the word. Instead of treating this discovery as cause to call out the plagiarism police and begin formal proceedings, I began from the premise that the student did not intentionally plagiarize, that they were unable to use source material correctly because they didn't know how. I used the Turnitin report to show the student how they are copying other's words inappropriately (the report is color-coded and shows plagiarism very clearly). It lets me bypass the accusation/defense part of the plagiarism question and get to the let-me-teach-you-how-to-do-this-well part. As part of my faculty development work in the first-year writing program, I teach other teachers to use it this way as well. If you are a student, discuss your concerns with your teacher. S/he just may not have thought about the intellectual property concerns (though I'd like to think that teachers are more aware than that). Educators are the ones most likely to get Turnitin's policies changed.

    • Re:An Educator's Point of View (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NoData ( 9132 ) <<moc.oohay> <ta> <_ataDoN_>> on Monday March 04, 2002 @08:07PM (#3109421)
      I too am an educator. I'm a senior (6th year) graduate student in Neuroscience at a major research university and have TA'ed or taught six courses. I've received the university's highest teaching prize for grad students, so I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do. Over the past few years, I've caught several serious plagiarists. I've sat on honor council hearings for accused plagiarists. I myself was TRIED for plagiarism in college (Turned out someone had actually plagiarized my physics lab stored on a public computer. This was a long time ago in a much more naive time of computer security).

      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)

    by Walker ( 96239 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @06:58PM (#3108949)

    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)

    by BigDogKelly ( 304379 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @07:03PM (#3108986)
    The set-up: I am not a lawyer, i am a senior computer science major at a decent sized private universtiy who has just started using turnitin.com (http://www.turnitin.com) OK...

    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)

    by jmbarrie ( 564102 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @07:45PM (#3109270)
    My name is John Barrie, and I am one of the original founders of Turnitin.com. After reading Foo Shackelford's comments regarding Turnitin.com, along with the comments of others on the Slashdot list, I would like to clarify our position on some of the issues discussed:

    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)

    by Compulawyer ( 318018 ) on Monday March 04, 2002 @08:00PM (#3109370)
    On the home page, they crow about helping educators reduce plagarism and even post a quote from a supposed UC Berkeley Prof (maybe he really is and really said what they claim - I haven't checked). However, in the Usage Agreement, there is an express limitation prohibiting "commercial use." Call me suspicious, but it seems that a professor engaged in his profession and checking papers of students is engaged in a "commercial use."

    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" ?

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Close