If your point is that most students are trustworthy, and thus might have good reason to be annoyed at the lack of trust implied in the use of TurnItIn, then i agree completely.
But the fact is that, of the people i caught, in some cases there was little or no indication that they were untrustworthy until i happened to notice a particularly beautifully written sentence—one that was out of character with the rest of their work—and ran it through Google. Another clue is when they make comprehensive and unlikely references to ideas or people that aren’t in any of the readings. Sometimes this just indicates a good breadth of knowledge on their part, but sometimes it also turns out that they’ve nicked the section from somewhere else.
I’m of two minds about the whole TurnItIn thing. On the one hand, i’ve always hated the “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about” argument in situations like this. At the same time, though, while the numerical majority of students do the work honestly and to the best of their abilities, the fact is that cheating in education is of epidemic proportions, and those who cheat without getting caught not only cheat the institution, but they cheat their fellow students.
Universities, as some people never tire of reminding us, are not quite the same as the “real world.” I’m not making an argument that they are irrelevant or pointless (hell, it’s where i hope to make a living), only that we accept that educational institutions such as universities do whatever they can to maintain a set of intellectual and ethical standards commensurate with their role in society. Maintaining those standards allows the university to dictate certain requirements, like completion of all written work or attendance at all classes. And if maintaining the standards also involves running student papers through a database to catch palgiarism, i don’t really have a problem with it, despite the fact that i don’t use TurnItIn myself.
I’m not expressly opposed to the decision by Mount St. Vincent University to decide against using TurnItIn. This decision was apparently reached by faculty and students, and reports i’ve read suggest that most professors at the school weren’t interested in using the service anyway. Despite its growing profile, TurnItIn is still used by only a minority of US colleges and universities. The only thing i had a problem with was some of the arguments put forward by the students, who argued that using such technological tools to detect cheating constituted an abrogation of the school’s responsibility to teach its students proper ethical behaviour and proper intellectual and academic skills.
For example, from this article:
Quite a few other reports quoted similar comments.
This argument implies that there’s some sort of zero-sum game here, that if the university uses TurnItIn, then instructors will, by definition, be less conscientious and have less time for their students.
This is a completely specious argument. If, for example, i decided to use TurnItIn, it would not change the amount of time i spend grading papers and providing comments and other helpful feedback for students. It would not change the number of hours i make myself available for consultation each week. It would not stop me spending considerable time answering students’ email queries. In fact, not having to spend my own time searching Google for suspicious phrases and passages might actually allow more time for doing the stuff that really matters.
And, as has been demonstrated time and again, an educational institution can put all the time and effort in the world into instilling good scholarly practices and ethical standards into its students, and cultivating an atmosphere of intellectual honesty and mutual trust, but some of the fuckers are still going to copy their papers off the internet, and those people should be caught, for everyone’s benefit.
