[Air-l] turnitin

[James W Craine]

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 21:01:19 -0800
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>Subject: air-l Digest, Vol 32, Issue 9  
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>Message: 9
>Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:37:16 -0500
>From: Douglas Eyman <eymand at earthlink.net>
>Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue
>To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
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>I don't believe there are any legal cases that have been decided about 
>turnitin.com, but there have been successful student challenges to its 
>implementation --primarily in Canada, see for example:
>
>http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060309/plagiarism_tool_060309/20060309?hub=Canada
>http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/01/16/mcgill_turnitin030116.html
>
>As Alexis notes, there are pretty strong claims on both sides. For a good 
>example of both, see Charlie Lowe's argument against its use
>
>http://cyberdash.com/plagiarism-detection-software-issues-gvsu
>
>and Turnitin.com's response
>
>http://kairosnews.org/turnitins-response-to-recent-posts-discu
>
>I've done several workshops for writing teachers that address the issue of 
>plagiarism, and even though there isn't a clear legal finding that turnitin.com 
>violates students' intellectual property rights, I think that making the case on 
>that basis is a bit of a red herring -- turnitin.com (and other plagiarism 
>detection services) can be a good tool for teaching about plagiarism, but it's 
>not a good tool for stopping it. What *is* a good tool for stopping plagiarism 
>is designing better assignments, getting students invested in their work, and 
>treating plagiarism as a pedagogical problem rather than a moral one.
>
>And one further note (which prompted my reply):
>
>Alexis Turner wrote:
>> A few other notes to consider:
>> Turnitin does not store the actual paper.  They store a hash of the paper, 
>> weakening the argument that IP is being violated.
>
>If you put in a substantive amount of the "plagiarized text," the hash that is 
>stored is output as identical to the original work that has been collected by 
>the company. In other words, if you took all of a book that someone else has 
>written and put it into a database, if when you get the output it reads the 
>same, then the IP issues are still the same (that is, the IP violation argument 
>is certainly not weakened unless the output of the comparison itself is never 
>displayed). I tend to think that students who object to a guilty-until-proven 
>innocent use of systems like turnitin.com should certainly be allowed to 
>question the ethics of instituting such a system.
>
>I believe there is also an option to check the paper but prevent it from being 
>added to the database (I know this is true of mydropbox.com and fairly sure that 
>is also in turnitin.com) -- this allows students to check their own work in an 
>ethically responsible way; if the instructor can establish a pedagogically 
>responsible use of the tool (by utilizing this feature and by using it as a 
>learning tool rather than a detection service), then both students and teachers 
>would be well served by it.
>
>Douglas Eyman
>Sr. Editor
>Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy
>http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/
>

I have to agree with Doug on this - I tried Turnitin for one semester and was quickly bombarded with refusals to complete the assignment if Turnitin was required - since I was teaching a class in critical geography my own arguments were used against me so in that respect my students did indeed learn something - and it made me rethink not just the legalities of the program but the ethical issues as well - the next semester (and all the ones since then) plagiarism in my classes has come to a complete halt when I worked hard to create assignments that were unique to the class and to the individual doing the writing - this approach has worked quite well for me at the undergraduate level - for graduate students  I simply require the paper be submitted to a professional journal - this gives another level of review and since graduate students have in a sense indicated their desire to pursue a professional career in the field by enrolling in a graduate program, any hint of plagiarism !
!
would be ruinous to their academic future



James Craine
Department of Geography
California State University, Northridge
APCG Yearbook Editor