At colleges and universities nationwide, the debate over technology’s role in enforcing academic integrity has come to a head with the advent of plagiarism-detection services provided by for-profit companies such as https://www.turnitin.com.
Turnitin.com, which lists Georgetown University as a client, compares papers submitted by students to a database comprised of online journals, books and academic sources, as well as 22 million previously submitted essays. The site then provides an “originality report” which summarizes whether a student has copied a paper from one of these sources, along with a link to the original source of any plagiarized text. By seeking out and itemizing plagiarism in detail, Turnitin.com is seen by many professors and administrators as an effective deterrent to cheating.
At first glance, Turnitin.com seems to be a worthy panacea to the rising tide of plagiarism that has resulted from the increased use of the Internet on college campuses; stressed-out or procrastinating students need only type a few words into Google in order to find a wealth of Web sites catering to their last-minute paper-writing needs. Some of these sites – with names like Cheathouse.com and Schoolsucks.com – hardly bother to hide their true aims, providing only tongue-in-cheek admonitions warning students to use their services “for research purposes only.”
Despite its benefits with regards to dissuading cheating, Turnitin.com – at least in its present incarnation – is guilty of violating students’ intellectual property rights. Since every paper submitted to the service is retained in a database, Turnitin.com is essentially making a profit off the backs of students who are never compensated for the use of their copyrighted works. For every paper that is submitted to Turnitin.com, the company’s market value is enhanced – in its advertising copy, much is made over the size and scope of Turnitin.com’s database of available work, much of which would not exist without the contributions of students.
Although Turnitin.com recommends that students either submit papers to the site themselves or consent to their work being sent in by a professor, submission is often made mandatory: If a student wishes to pass a course, he or she is required to upload his or her paper to the site. Thus, students often have little choice in the matter. Recently, a McGill University student lodged a formal complaint against the university’s administration alleging that the forced submission of his work to the site comprised unfair use of his property – and won. Hopefully this incident will serve as precedent in the fight to preserve students’ intellectual property rights.
As it stands at present, U.S. copyright law states that any written work is under protection once it is completed and set in a form viewable by any interested party – hence, any academic work completed by any student is automatically copyrighted. Turnitin.com compensates online databases and journals for the use of their copyrighted works; why shouldn’t it do the same for the millions of graduate and undergraduate students who are marginalized by its current system?
Plagiarism is obviously unethical, and hundreds of universities’ honor codes state as much in black and white. It seems rather hypocritical that any institution of higher learning which is seeking to prevent plagiarism (which is, after all, the theft of an author’s intellectual property) should resort to using a service which robs students of the same rights, however. Georgetown has also already dealt with incidents involving students using file-sharing programs to download multimedia materials for free without the permission of the artists. How can our university reasonably expect to force students to allow their own work to be used to augment a for-profit company’s database of essays without facing any accusations of duplicity?
Finally, in addition to the obvious intellectual property questions raised by the use of Turnitin.com, what of the “guilty until proven innocent” climate that such a service creates on campus? If universities make blanket use of cheating-detection services the standard, they assume the worst about students. Instead of employing a punishment mechanism which, in the end, does a disservice to the pedagogy upon which universities pride themselves, professors should be proactive in order to teach students how to become better writers. In the end, thoughtful and specific assignments are what help us learn – not the threat of Big Brother looking over our shoulders.
Allison Davis is a senior in the College, opinion editor for THE HOYA and a member of THE HOYA Editorial Board.