[Air-l] turnitin musings

[Dr.Cameron Adams]

To begin, I have never used turnitin, but have been tempted to. Why is 
that the case?  The problem is not that more students are plagiarising 
(though it seems like it to me), but instead what the nature of the 
student body is.  My recent experience is in the UK so it may vary for 
you, but I suspect not as much as one might think.  Two things are 
going on that will suffice as setting to my argument: the government 
wants something like 50% of the population to go to university and, 
higher education is being degraded to a disappointing level.   Let me 
contextualise the latter.  In my university I have had to take a 
"teaching" course to satisfy a requirement.  In this we are told of the 
(apparently) government policy of teaching our students "transferable 
skills" (basic reading, writing, etc.) at the expense of our subjects.  
The idea is that physics students and anthropology students leave the 
university with the same stuff.  The degree is to differentiate between 
job candidates in service type work (bank management and the like).

The effect of these two things is that I have a rather large number of 
students who do not know why they are here.  Only two of my students 
have any interest in the topic of their course of study (their major is 
anthropology, but they hope to get some unknown "job" in the 
future--this is half way through their degree).  One of my students 
claims to have literally pulled the topic out of a hat!  Basically we 
have a lot of unmotivated students.  Far more than traditional methods 
of cheater detection can handle.  I have to mark so much that I do not 
have the time to carefully assess changes in style, etc.  The apparent 
lack of drive makes it seem less critical to do original work.  After 
all, as my students put it, they are not planning to be 
anthropologists.  (actually, when I assess work a common whinge is "you 
act like you think we will become anthropologists").

The high numbers and low ownership of their education coupled with easy 
ways to cheat, again, trumps our now outmoded means of cheater 
detection.  In this context we have lost the arms race.

Thinking about it, its not so much a question of using technology to 
keep up.  Given fewer essays with more time to mark them, I could still 
catch all but the most sophisticated of plagiarism.  It takes more time 
to assess some of these essays than it took the student to write them.  
All of us are overworked and I think that this is the main problem.  
Besides, I think if we rely too much on tech, we could begin to lose 
our critical faculties that allow us to notice clues to plagiarised 
material.

That said I have a couple of thoughts that may or may not be legit:

Couldn't student privacy could be protected by using a one time code at 
submission instead of their name?  Another small note is that 
creatively recreating assignments is easier earlier in one's career 
than later.  If it were not we'd be artists instead ;0).

Cheers,

Cameron Adams