Students turn on Turnitin
March 30th, 2007 | by Tim Wilson |It was only a matter of time. According to a story in the Washington Post, two McLean High School students are suing Turnitin.com for infringing their copyright. The crux of the matter seems to be that students are required to license their work to Turnitin so the service can store their work and use it in future plagiarism checks. So if we get right down to it, students are forced to use Turnitin because it’s required by their university or high school and then forfeit their rights to control their own copyright. IANAL, but that sounds like a pretty rotten deal to me. I’m rooting for the kids.
Plagiarism is a nasty problem to be sure. I dealt with it many times myself in my career as a classroom teacher. In this case it seems that educators may be leaning a bit too much on technology as a remedy when more effective collaboration between the teacher and students would be a better answer. I’m not trying to be flippant here, I just think we’ve gotten a bit lazy on this one.
3 Responses to “Students turn on Turnitin”
By Marcus G on Mar 30, 2007 | Reply
Instructors need to use Turnitin as a teaching tool, which many do. Allow the students to use the tool to do a self-check of their papers so they can see if they inadvertently copied something without proper citation. Plagiarism is a huge problem in schools. How many papers are turned in each day with stolen intellectual property? Some kids, and some adults, can’t even spell plagiarism, let alone know how to prevent it. Some don’t care because they steal music off of the internet too.
By Tom on Apr 1, 2007 | Reply
In my mind, once you start calling people “theives” and saying “theft” and “stealing” every other word the conversation ends because students stop listening. It works the same way with teachers I might add. You can’t start off calling someone names and then expect them to listen to you with respect.
I’m not saying students should be able to copy chunks of information at will without citations but IMO Marcus’s comment certainly comes across as really hostile (and somewhat condescending) and that tactic has been tried for a long time without success. It’s time to go another route.
Turnitin is not a teaching tool. It’s more like a policing tool. If you want to plagiarize or use other people’s work, you’d just run the work through the service to see if it picks up things and alter it slightly until it doesn’t pick it up. Maybe you could call that teaching.
I think the goal should be to create some more original paper topics or maybe not use the same prompts for 10 year stretches. Those actions seem like they’d do a lot more to create learning than relying on a system like this. I’d also like to see the professiorial backlash if they were forced to participate in a similar system in order to have their work published.
Tom