Why I’m Turning Off ‘Turnitin’
Apr 2nd, 2007 • Posted in: Commentary
In one of the more interesting turns of the worm in the week’s ethics news, two students at a Virginia high school have filed a $900,000 lawsuit against Turnitin, a commercial service that some schools and universities use to detect plagiarism.
Turnitin works by requiring students to submit their work through the company’s website link, which then computes a “similarity index” and provides links to possibly plagiarized sources. According to BusinessWeek, the service has about 9,000 subscribing institutions, which pay about 80 cents per student per year.
The plaintiffs charge that the service violates copyright law by archiving student papers, creating a huge database that can be searched for similarities among student papers, Internet material, and collected articles.
The students who filed the suit say they object to the archiving of their papers without their consent. In addition, they say they don’t like the forced imposition of a service that presumes guilt. The parents of one of the plaintiffs told the Washington Post, “You can’t take a person’s work and run it through a computer and make an honest person out of them. My son’s major objection is that he does not cheat, and this assumes he does.”
Does Turnitin, in an effort to prevent an unethical act, commit a breach of ethics? If so, can we excuse small breaches, such as the unauthorized archiving of a student’s paper, or small erosions in the climate of trust between student and teacher if they produce a “greater good” — minimizing cheating?
Let me preface the rest of this column by noting that as a journalist, author, and college professor, I detest plagiarism both professionally and personally. I regard plagiarism as theft of property. This is more than an abstract view: A few years ago I was involved in a lawsuit against a firm that produced course reading packets by copying, without permission or payment, entire chapters out of various books. In my case, the “theft” amounted to three chapters of a media textbook I’d written. I had records of my working time and was able to document that those three chapters amounted to about two months of self-torture for seven evenings a week in my basement office, pounding away at the keyboard.
I recall the same sense of outrage over a quote from an elusive politician, which I snagged after waiting in the rain for an entire afternoon. That quote worked its way into several publications without attribution to the original source — an act that was, in my view, theft of my patient work over six soggy hours.
To make matters worse, Internet-enabled plagiarism now has substantially changed the dynamic of teaching. Many professors no longer assign traditional essays because they are confected so easily via computer cut-and-paste. Relatively plagiarism-proof assignments now may include oral exams, in-class written tests, and presentations — surely valuable activities, but no substitute for the linear learning that takes place when sources are gathered and woven together to produce a cohesive, coherent argument.
Having said that, I don’t use Turnitin and don’t plan to.
First, I believe there is something to the argument that it’s wrong to make commercial use out of archived student papers when the student has no choice in the matter. As an intellectual property lawyer interviewed by the Post noted, “fair use” is difficult to define, but generally means that you are allowed to use reasonable amounts of material for educational purposes, scholarship, or news. Turnitin is a commercial service that makes money from archived student papers, and it only works by having the papers stored in its database.
Second, I’m reluctant to turn over too much human judgment to machines. I can’t say whether the “similarity index” is accurate or not, but some press reports have recounted incidents where “similarities” flagged by the service were doubtful, or in which clear cases of plagiarism — done intentionally to test the service — were missed. Yes, I’ll use Internet search engines to check for plagiarism if I’m suspicious, but judging from the accuracy of computer-generated files used by insurance companies and credit bureaus — replete with errors that they cannot seem to fix — I think I’ll rely on my instincts to alert me when a student might be a plagiarist. Such a suspicion changes my thinking about a student, subtly and perhaps at a level I can’t control, and I’d rather not have that alarm come from a computer-generated false positive.
The third problem is the trickiest and reads just like a dilemma from a philosophy text. I know that neither I nor a computer database can detect all instances of plagiarism. With this in mind, I begin each semester with a discussion of plagiarism, why it hurts me, the students, and the system. I tell students that I will be honest with them and that I expect honesty in return. I don’t have a formal ethics pledge — on the theory that dishonest people would sign it anyway — and I don’t have a complete honor system because I will check sources with a search engine if my suspicions are aroused.
But in general, it is an honor system since only a shared value of honesty can make the classroom transaction work. But can I say “you’re on your honor” and “submit your work through this cheating-detection system” in the same breath? In my judgment, no. Turnitin? I think I’ll turn it off.
I could be off base, and if you think I’m wrong — or if you agree with my view for the same or other reasons — I’d like to hear from you. If we receive enough responses I may be able to compile them for a future column.
©2007 Institute for Global Ethics
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