Turnitin -- the discussion continues

I read over the links from Andy, JackieB, and Charles regarding Turnitin.com and potential intellectual property rights violations. Harvard isn't the first university to turn down turnitin.com; a Canadian unversity had a couple of years ago for the similar reasons as  secretary of Harvard College’s Administrative Board, John L. Ellison said in an article for the Harvard Crimson:
"I think educating students on time management, and also on how to ask for extensions and accommodations, is far better than trying to catch them [plagiarizing]. I would prefer that we had no examples of plagiarism and that, of course, is our goal.”"
I, like the Harvard professors quoted in the article, have picked up on copied statements in essays. Sometimes I can't find the match to the statement(s) in question when I google, but often I can. It's a lot of legwork in the midst of grading essays but doable. And, in the classes I teach, the bulk of the violations have been from EL students who find someone saying what they wish to say and copying the text. But, as I mentioned before (I think) I have also had students who copied essays that were turned into a partner teacher's class the day before. I wouldn't necessarily know that my student lifted an entire paper off her student's desk and copied it. I was suspicious because the student was far behind, but the essay was possible. Until the student owned up to stealing it from a friend (without, the student said, the friend's permission).
A teacher at a neighboring school used it with her AP students. The first time they turned in papers, roughly 80 percent of her class had plagiarized. We can talk about teaching kids to do the right thing, but in a high stakes world, one in which corporate and political leaders regularly get away with not doing the right thing, it's a difficult lesson for some students learn.
The Washington Post article featured students at MacLean High School who rebelled against the program.: "It irked a lot of people because there's an implication of assumed guilt," said Ben Donovan, 18, a senior who helped collect 1,190 student signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service. "It's like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student."
I can see how this might be considered true except that students have, in a public school, less privacy  and, I am not really checking my students' work as much as I hope to thwart another kid using one of my students' essays.
It is a good discussion and one I hope to continue to have. Is it a violation? Charles explores this issue more eloquently and in depth here.

Comments

[What Now?]

The interesting experience I had when my school first adopted Turnitin is that all of my students completely freaked out and were terrified that they were going to get caught plagiarizing. It quickly became clear that they really didn't understand plagiarism at all, since even students who weren't cheating were afraid of getting caught. Plagiarism was clearly the sort of thing they thought one could fall into without really knowing it and that anyone might be guilty at any time; moreover, they somehow thought that the program might decide they had plagiarized even if they hadn't done so. So it was a wonderful educational moment about what actually constitutes plagiarism; not that we hadn't had exactly the same conversation before, but somehow the stakes were higher now that they were submitting papers to Turnitin.

[HB]

The previous comment is interesting. I know my english language learners have to be explained very clearly why they aren't allowed to lift verbatim writing. They don't seem to get it..I explain that putting their name on someone else's thoughts is essentially lying, and while this is extreme, I soften it enough so that they know I do not think they are liars, but rather that they aren't sure of the rules of the game.

It seems to me that if a kid or any person is generating their own thoughts and writing their own stuff, turnitin should cause no concern whatsoever, and in fact would be a sort of welcoming thing, because the playing field would be evened.

It's the first time I have seen this discussion, it is an interesting one...

[fredthefish]

@What Now?
>>It quickly became clear that they really didn't understand plagiarism at all, since even students who weren't cheating were afraid of getting caught.>> I think EL students are often caught up in the copying issue, but what constitutes plagiarism is an ongoing discussion. For example, I've been pounding my students about summaries vs. paraphrasing vs. quotations (a skill the local colleges say students lack). It didn't occur to them to cite a paraphrase by page. And, now that I'm typing this, I bet they wouldn't think that summarizing a book would mean you'd want to actually give the name of the book and its author. (smacks self in forehead)

[Jane Phillips]

The school for which I teach uses turnitin.com as a policing tool. A while back, I decided to test the system and submitted my own work that has been published on the web (not by myself but another entity, more public) and the results were disappointing. Some came back as 100% plagiarised (that was the correct answer) but some referred to second-hand sites that had stolen my work from the afore-mentioned entity. Hmm, I thought, why can't it find the primary source? Most disturbing were some of my articles that are posted on the web, can be found by simple googling, and still came up with 0% copied.

Turnitin.com is only a tool, and it is fallible. The best tool to find plagiarism is to know your students' writing and recognize the warning signs of copying.

[fredthefish]

I agree with your comment wholeheartedly. The student Turnitin caught cheating was one who'd never done a lick of work so I was already reviewing his essay. Tool, not magic bullet.

[Kevin]

I've been using turnitin for the last four years and find it to be a pretty affective tool for it's grademark system. I haven't found another online database that is so teacher friendly in terms of generating easy to read online papers. I don't use turnitin for it's plagiarism tools, although it has come in handy on occasion when students do copy and paste from academic work, but more for the ability to have a comprehensive database and a time-stamp of submission. It also allows teachers to promote personal responsibility by assigning work in a more collegiate fashion. Now, admittedly I have a fairly lax policy on their submission dates and use the service mostly for reflection/opinion papers so I'm not striking the fear of God into my students by asking them to submit to the service.

I think it's just like any other technological resource, It's helpful when it's optional and a hassle when it's mandatory.