Notes on the Anti-Turnitin.com Campaign...
I noticed that this blog was getting hits from google searches for search terms relating to how to trick or outfox turnitin.com, so I followed some of those search terms myself to other sources. I have defended turnitin.com at this blog before, which is probably generating the hits here. In hindsight I obviously shouldn't have been surprised by the material I found against turnitin.com. I had heard some of the arguments before; some of them were comments to that earlier entry.
The most comprehensive article I have found is Guilty Until Proven Innocent. Most other attacks on or complaints about turnitin.com, like http://www.hilwerda.com/turnitin.htm, are variations of themes in the Guilty article. The article makes a strong case for stopping all use of turnitin.com, but not as strong as it would like to appear. Here, I will address some of the arguments. The trick is to see if using turnitin.com can still be justified and whether it can be justified without resorting to arguments that too closely resemble those of our Homeland Security people when justifying new forms of intrusion:
The presumption of guilt: The title of the essay comes from the assumption, explained in one of the first paragraphs, that submitting papers to turnitin.com is assuming that students are guilty. By using this checking service, the instructor is supposedly assuming guilt. I disagree. That is like saying that airports assume I am carrying a bomb because they search my luggage. If I check all student papers or only random papers, then it is routine and fair - just like at the airport. If I check only those I am suspicious of, then it is because I do indeed have reason to suspect cheating. In that case, there is no assumption of guilt. Either way, I think this argument is weak.
Turnitin.com results are unreliable: This argument also fails. Just because the results I get are not 100% reliable, does not mean that I cannot use them - within reason. In my case, I routinely ignore most plagiarism scores below 10% and often let higher scores go through. It depends on the context. If I get a bunch of 1% hits for chunks of sentences from 20 different sources, then obviously, those are just useful phrases that keep turning up. But if I get a 5% hit, word for word, from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, and see that the student cited a book that doesn't exist, guess what? The article says, Professors who support Turnitin may disagree about Turnitin's level of effectiveness but, of course, they only know about the instances of intentional/unintentional plagiarism that Turnitin actually detects. They don't—and never will—know about the acts of "intelligent plagiarism" that are absolutely undetectable to Turnitin. Therefore, most professors' assessment/opinion of Turnitin.com is inherently skewed and undeservedly positive. That is a fallacy. Just because we know it doesn't catch everything doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. It only means we can't solely rely on it. The library won't catch all plagiarism either. Should I stop checking student references there as well? This is like arguing that we don't need police because they don't catch every thief.
Turnitin.com causes professors to become too dependent on machines to do their jobs: The twin of this objection is the frequent exortation on anti-turnitin.com sites that universities should hire more professors if the professors can't do their jobs or if the student-teacher ratio is too high. Again, this argument fails. In my field, I frequently have to read papers about things about which I cannot be an expert - and that is no different that it was 30 years ago. I teach western civilization, for example. Am I supposed to be intimately familiar with the hundreds of thousands of books on periods which I studied briefly in grad school? Can I, a specialist in 19th and 20th century Eastern Europe, recognize plagiarism in a paper about the Salem witch trials? Given the pace of publication these days, I doubt that even most experts are up to catching a lot of plagiarism in their field. While I agree that schools should hire more professors, this is not a reason to do so. (Getting me on tenure track is the best reason I can think of!) Only teaching in one's specialty would be intellectually stifling, even if possible.
Using Turnitin.com creates a negative learning environment and fosters distrust: Here is where I accept the arguments from the turnitin.com webpage in their full. I have found that when I have this tool, I can spend a lot more time teaching and less time wondering who might be cheating. It would not be fostering distrust if I told students say, 20 years ago, "Okay, I am going to check at least one footnote per paper in the library." It does not foster distrust at the airport to search bags. Up to a limit, it fosters security - and the sense of security. I recall the first U.S. class I taught, in 2002, before I got turnitin.com. I KNEW one of the papers I got was plagiarized. I hadn't even looked for it. It was just obvious. But I couldn't prove it. I ended up spending much more time, getting much more enraged at students in general because of those wasted hours. Now, I use turnitin.com and spend my much-reduced checking time on checking turnitin.com's reports or following up on concrete suspicions. I feel better about my teaching and my students.
Turnitin.com is a "gotcha," used to catch students cheating: Well, obviously. So what? So is the library. So is my knowledge of my field. Aren't we supposed to catch students who cheat? The article says that There's no denying the fact that professors have always viewed Turnitin as an "electronic Gestapo." ... Indeed, the Internet is absolutely flooded with professors' braggadocious blog and forum postings about how they "catch students" with Turnitin.com at the expense of the rights of the vast majority of students who do NOT cheat.. I certainly hope my blog isn't "braggadocious," but aren't we allowed to report our experiences and exchange our ideas? Turnitin.com is a tool for catching plagiarism that many of us use. We talk about our experiences with it. We generally do not do so with a mood of glee. On the contrary.
It encourages students to censor themselves to avoid being caught: I honestly don't understand this argument. It doesn't make sense to me why turnitin.com limits creativity or expression in student papers. Indeed, the wackier they are, the less likely they are to read like a Wikipedia or New Advent article.
Turnitin.com violates "fair use" by destroying marketability: ALL the examples listed as
reasons why turnitin.com violates marketability are scenarios which could have happened without turnitin.com and/or could have been avoided if the universities had followed the - OBVIOUS - policy of informing students of turnitin.com use. Read the examples and delete the "without the student knowing" passages and replacing references to turnitin.com with "went to the library." They involve things like someone else stealing the student's work and submitting it first. That could happen with print media as well - it would just be harder to do and harder to detect. Turnitin.com would appear to accelerate things, but not change them fundamentally.
Analogies like airport screening don't work with turnitin.com because...: The first five of the six examples listed as fallacious analogies defenders of turnitin.com use are based on the storage of information done by turnitin.com. Airport screeners and soccer referees, etc. don't copy and store information or property, so they are not comparable. Of course. But I don't use those analogies when talking about storage. I use the airport analogy when critiques complain about the distrust and assumptions associated with checking for plagiarism. See above.
The sixth argument is about defenders of turnitin.com claiming that student submissions in class are "work for hire" and students give up their copyright. The argument against that claim holds. Students do not give up their copyright. They are not employees of the university. It seems unlikely to me that the university could legally submit student work to a third party without the student's permission. The question is whether granting that permission can be made a condition of enrolment in the university or the class.
Hackers could get at the data: This is a bit like the argument that students shouldn't be on school buses because "think of the problems if there is an accident." The information age brings certain risks with it. If turnitin.com and the universities want to take this risk - the risk of a huge class action lawsuit, for example, if the system is hacked and all those papers end up "published" somewhere - that is their problem. The issue is again - see above - the question of getting student permission beforehand.
Instructors draw false conclusions: The article argues that later submissions are more likely to get nailed for plagiarism than earlier ones. Obviously. If instructors are not using turnitin.com with caution and common sense, then they shouldn't be using it. Like I said above, I let almost all low-percentage results slide and even high-percentage results if the context is correct. I doubt there are many instructors who don't study the results and simply fail students based on the color coding of the result. If they do, somebody should force them to listen to me play "He Leadeth Me" on the banjo.
Professors who support turnitin should lead by example: The article encourages all instructors who are for turnitin.com to submit their own work, including past publications, to the site to check for plagiarism. This argument is at its core irrelevant, but for the record I'll say that I have done just that. Everything that is still in electronic form has been submitted. Happy?
Turnitin.com violates FERPA: Because most all student papers are submitted with the student's name and other information, these submissions violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. That would appear to be the case and is a serious issue to consider. Playing by the rules here will make turnitin.com much more cumbersome to use, of course, (deleting that information before submitting the papers) but those are the rules. Student permission is again the crux, it would seem to me.
Turnitin.com violates copyright law: The argument that turnitin.com violates copyright law in that it makes a profit by the storage, reproduction and use of the copyrighted material of others is the K.O. argument. This argument would appear to be very potent. Turnitin.com retains a copy of the student's copyrighted work in its entirety and uses it to generate private profit. Detractors argue that this is illegal. On this will hinge the fate of turnitin.com.
The article goes on to give tips to webmasters on how to stop the turnitin.com bots from searching their pages and to students on how to avoid getting their papers submitted to the program. That is all well and good but does not, in my view, speak to the central and most interesting issues involved.
In sum, the arguments against turnitin.com are either fallacious or mostly about it not being used properly (issues of student permission, instructors with no clue, etc.). The crux is intellectual property law.
The most comprehensive article I have found is Guilty Until Proven Innocent. Most other attacks on or complaints about turnitin.com, like http://www.hilwerda.com/turnitin.htm, are variations of themes in the Guilty article. The article makes a strong case for stopping all use of turnitin.com, but not as strong as it would like to appear. Here, I will address some of the arguments. The trick is to see if using turnitin.com can still be justified and whether it can be justified without resorting to arguments that too closely resemble those of our Homeland Security people when justifying new forms of intrusion:
The presumption of guilt: The title of the essay comes from the assumption, explained in one of the first paragraphs, that submitting papers to turnitin.com is assuming that students are guilty. By using this checking service, the instructor is supposedly assuming guilt. I disagree. That is like saying that airports assume I am carrying a bomb because they search my luggage. If I check all student papers or only random papers, then it is routine and fair - just like at the airport. If I check only those I am suspicious of, then it is because I do indeed have reason to suspect cheating. In that case, there is no assumption of guilt. Either way, I think this argument is weak.
Turnitin.com results are unreliable: This argument also fails. Just because the results I get are not 100% reliable, does not mean that I cannot use them - within reason. In my case, I routinely ignore most plagiarism scores below 10% and often let higher scores go through. It depends on the context. If I get a bunch of 1% hits for chunks of sentences from 20 different sources, then obviously, those are just useful phrases that keep turning up. But if I get a 5% hit, word for word, from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, and see that the student cited a book that doesn't exist, guess what? The article says, Professors who support Turnitin may disagree about Turnitin's level of effectiveness but, of course, they only know about the instances of intentional/unintentional plagiarism that Turnitin actually detects. They don't—and never will—know about the acts of "intelligent plagiarism" that are absolutely undetectable to Turnitin. Therefore, most professors' assessment/opinion of Turnitin.com is inherently skewed and undeservedly positive. That is a fallacy. Just because we know it doesn't catch everything doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. It only means we can't solely rely on it. The library won't catch all plagiarism either. Should I stop checking student references there as well? This is like arguing that we don't need police because they don't catch every thief.
Turnitin.com causes professors to become too dependent on machines to do their jobs: The twin of this objection is the frequent exortation on anti-turnitin.com sites that universities should hire more professors if the professors can't do their jobs or if the student-teacher ratio is too high. Again, this argument fails. In my field, I frequently have to read papers about things about which I cannot be an expert - and that is no different that it was 30 years ago. I teach western civilization, for example. Am I supposed to be intimately familiar with the hundreds of thousands of books on periods which I studied briefly in grad school? Can I, a specialist in 19th and 20th century Eastern Europe, recognize plagiarism in a paper about the Salem witch trials? Given the pace of publication these days, I doubt that even most experts are up to catching a lot of plagiarism in their field. While I agree that schools should hire more professors, this is not a reason to do so. (Getting me on tenure track is the best reason I can think of!) Only teaching in one's specialty would be intellectually stifling, even if possible.
Using Turnitin.com creates a negative learning environment and fosters distrust: Here is where I accept the arguments from the turnitin.com webpage in their full. I have found that when I have this tool, I can spend a lot more time teaching and less time wondering who might be cheating. It would not be fostering distrust if I told students say, 20 years ago, "Okay, I am going to check at least one footnote per paper in the library." It does not foster distrust at the airport to search bags. Up to a limit, it fosters security - and the sense of security. I recall the first U.S. class I taught, in 2002, before I got turnitin.com. I KNEW one of the papers I got was plagiarized. I hadn't even looked for it. It was just obvious. But I couldn't prove it. I ended up spending much more time, getting much more enraged at students in general because of those wasted hours. Now, I use turnitin.com and spend my much-reduced checking time on checking turnitin.com's reports or following up on concrete suspicions. I feel better about my teaching and my students.
Turnitin.com is a "gotcha," used to catch students cheating: Well, obviously. So what? So is the library. So is my knowledge of my field. Aren't we supposed to catch students who cheat? The article says that There's no denying the fact that professors have always viewed Turnitin as an "electronic Gestapo." ... Indeed, the Internet is absolutely flooded with professors' braggadocious blog and forum postings about how they "catch students" with Turnitin.com at the expense of the rights of the vast majority of students who do NOT cheat.. I certainly hope my blog isn't "braggadocious," but aren't we allowed to report our experiences and exchange our ideas? Turnitin.com is a tool for catching plagiarism that many of us use. We talk about our experiences with it. We generally do not do so with a mood of glee. On the contrary.
It encourages students to censor themselves to avoid being caught: I honestly don't understand this argument. It doesn't make sense to me why turnitin.com limits creativity or expression in student papers. Indeed, the wackier they are, the less likely they are to read like a Wikipedia or New Advent article.
Turnitin.com violates "fair use" by destroying marketability: ALL the examples listed as
reasons why turnitin.com violates marketability are scenarios which could have happened without turnitin.com and/or could have been avoided if the universities had followed the - OBVIOUS - policy of informing students of turnitin.com use. Read the examples and delete the "without the student knowing" passages and replacing references to turnitin.com with "went to the library." They involve things like someone else stealing the student's work and submitting it first. That could happen with print media as well - it would just be harder to do and harder to detect. Turnitin.com would appear to accelerate things, but not change them fundamentally.
Analogies like airport screening don't work with turnitin.com because...: The first five of the six examples listed as fallacious analogies defenders of turnitin.com use are based on the storage of information done by turnitin.com. Airport screeners and soccer referees, etc. don't copy and store information or property, so they are not comparable. Of course. But I don't use those analogies when talking about storage. I use the airport analogy when critiques complain about the distrust and assumptions associated with checking for plagiarism. See above.
The sixth argument is about defenders of turnitin.com claiming that student submissions in class are "work for hire" and students give up their copyright. The argument against that claim holds. Students do not give up their copyright. They are not employees of the university. It seems unlikely to me that the university could legally submit student work to a third party without the student's permission. The question is whether granting that permission can be made a condition of enrolment in the university or the class.
Hackers could get at the data: This is a bit like the argument that students shouldn't be on school buses because "think of the problems if there is an accident." The information age brings certain risks with it. If turnitin.com and the universities want to take this risk - the risk of a huge class action lawsuit, for example, if the system is hacked and all those papers end up "published" somewhere - that is their problem. The issue is again - see above - the question of getting student permission beforehand.
Instructors draw false conclusions: The article argues that later submissions are more likely to get nailed for plagiarism than earlier ones. Obviously. If instructors are not using turnitin.com with caution and common sense, then they shouldn't be using it. Like I said above, I let almost all low-percentage results slide and even high-percentage results if the context is correct. I doubt there are many instructors who don't study the results and simply fail students based on the color coding of the result. If they do, somebody should force them to listen to me play "He Leadeth Me" on the banjo.
Professors who support turnitin should lead by example: The article encourages all instructors who are for turnitin.com to submit their own work, including past publications, to the site to check for plagiarism. This argument is at its core irrelevant, but for the record I'll say that I have done just that. Everything that is still in electronic form has been submitted. Happy?
Turnitin.com violates FERPA: Because most all student papers are submitted with the student's name and other information, these submissions violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. That would appear to be the case and is a serious issue to consider. Playing by the rules here will make turnitin.com much more cumbersome to use, of course, (deleting that information before submitting the papers) but those are the rules. Student permission is again the crux, it would seem to me.
Turnitin.com violates copyright law: The argument that turnitin.com violates copyright law in that it makes a profit by the storage, reproduction and use of the copyrighted material of others is the K.O. argument. This argument would appear to be very potent. Turnitin.com retains a copy of the student's copyrighted work in its entirety and uses it to generate private profit. Detractors argue that this is illegal. On this will hinge the fate of turnitin.com.
The article goes on to give tips to webmasters on how to stop the turnitin.com bots from searching their pages and to students on how to avoid getting their papers submitted to the program. That is all well and good but does not, in my view, speak to the central and most interesting issues involved.
In sum, the arguments against turnitin.com are either fallacious or mostly about it not being used properly (issues of student permission, instructors with no clue, etc.). The crux is intellectual property law.
mhatlie - 13. Mar, 23:34 Topic: Teaching http://hatlie.twoday.net/stories/3433063/
Three Points
I have read your counter arguments from the website Guilty until proven innocent. I therefore offer three more;
1-The paper's your student's write are not your papers, they are not Turnitin papers. Turnitin has no claim to them, and yet they use them as part of a commercial (they charge money) application without consent. Further more Turnitin has no right to ask the professor's permission before displaying a student's papers; again IT IS NOT THEIR PAPER!!! IT IS NOT THEIR PROPERTY!!! IT IS NOT YOUR PROPERTY!!! It is the STUDENT WHO WROTE THE PAPER who has property claim to the paper!!!
2-Currently their is a lawsuit challenging Turnitin's potential illigal use of student's papers wherein turnitin will be fined 900,000. If this lawsuit is successful, many, many students will be seeking copyrights and also suing Tuenitin. (I know I will) Consider the environment Turnitin has created in the classroom. Students have to seek legal means to protect themselves from having their copyrighted material illegally used. The lack of trust generated by Turnitin has hindered the Professor/Student relationship. Instead of a free environment where the students felt they could trust in the professor to protect and even advocate their rights, they are now faced with having to get a lawyer to enforce their rights.
3-What kind of message does schools and universities send by using Big Brother tactics? The universities, schools, professors, and teachers all send this clear message, "We(the turnitin users) are more than willing to violate your right every single time we make you submit a paper to Turnitin in order to occasionally "protect" the rights of others."
The fact of the matter is, turnitin is a blatant spit in the face of students, a corporate machine that makes millions by violating rights, and an inefficient and highly flawed means of preventing plagiarism. Any school, university, professor, or teacher who use Turnitin is a hypocrite, AND party to violating student's rights. Even worse, when these institutions and professionals realize this and still use it giving the lame excuse "well I know its morally wrong but it makes my life easier." Practice what you preach sir, and respect intellectual rights by not violating your student's rights.
Read, then rant...