Turnitin.com - Placebo for Plagiarism or Worse?

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?

Re:Uhm would somebody care to explain this to me

Turnitin.com is a site which many school suse to catch students copying papers. It will highlight even small passages that appeared in other works screened by the service. Thus every time a teacher submits a paper, it gets scanned and regardless if any plagarism is found, the paper is added to the database to be scanned against in the future. When a paper is scanned, the potentially plagarised sections are highlighted with links back to the original source. What the teacher does with a plagarised paper is up to them.

The trick is, when papers are submitted to be checked, Turnitin.com is claiming ownership of the paper without the consent of the author since the teacher is the one who submitted it.

No, really, what are they talking about?

I can't find anywhere on the site this company says they own the works sent to them. Here are the terms of use [turnitin.com] All I can find is the usual "contents of this site are copyrighted", but that's the site, not the papers submitted.

GPL'd papers .... obvious plagarism .....

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...

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.

Colleges can be hurt by cheating

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.

Canned response to English instructor:

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

"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.."

The question is simple

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.

Trust ??

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.

Panacea, not Placebo

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

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.

Not only in universities....

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.

One way to avoid accusations of plagiarism...

...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.

Turnitin doesn't own your work

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.

Trust relationship with students?

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.

Turnitin.com central to Kansas cheating scandal

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!

output of MSFT source code turitin run :-)

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

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

Who owns the paper

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.

Cheating IS a serious problem at my school

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.

I think this is a great service...

...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.

An Educator's Point of View

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

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?

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....

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

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

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" ?