high horses (Score 1)

As a professor at a small liberal arts college that uses Turnitin.com, I am very familiar with the arguments for and against the use of this kind of service. I was initially concerned, like the writers of many of the posts here, that use of such a service would undermine any sense of implicit trust in the classroom. This concern, however, as I have found in my last few years teaching, has already been made moot by the students themselves: this trust exists today in theory only, and is violated, with impunity, by students on a regular basis. Anyone who claims otherwise is simply not looking hard enough, or is in denial. Consequently, I find that the most vocal opponents of use of services like Turnitin.com (who incidentally also invoke the whole litany of high-minded, anachronistic IP rhetoric thrown about here at slashdot) are those very same students who find they will now have to start writing their own papers. In discussions in my classes, I have found that most students actually support using Turnitin.com, simply because they know many of their peers plagiarize, and like myself and my colleagues, are just sick of it. Sure, in an ideal educational environment, there would be no place for a service like Turnitin.com. And I'd love to be able to treat my students (and their work) with the measure of respect called for by many of the posts here. I'll do so when my students start to earn it.