There is no presumption of guilt here, any more than there is when the SAT makes test-takers show ID and leave everything but their pencils at home. I wonder if these kids want to be able to reuse the papers and are worried that they’ll get caught at it in college.
I did. What’s sad here is that I had to sign a new one last week, and it went out of my mind.
Next question: What is the difference between a machine reading a paper, and retaining its contents, not for dissemination, but rather for other papers to be checked against them, and me reading a paper and remembering its contents?
Same difference as you remembering that Metallica concert you went to last weekend, and recording it – not for dissemination, but rather to compare against other concerts you attend later.
Just how else would you like to see such a service run?
Just looking at the basics mentioned here in the article and in this thread: Turnitin.com has a library in excess of 22 millions papers and they are used by many schools both at the HS and collegiate level to help weed out plagiarism. So, for their business model to work, they need servers capable of searching through 22 million papers for matches in a timely manner, they’ll also need to have a large hunk of bandwidth, or the marginal utility of the service will be less than the cost in terms of time and effort to the end users, the teachers. And if the teachers complain that the service isn’t worth using, the service will lose it’s revenue source.
At this point, I think that such a service is a good thing to have available to teachers. As I see it, the choices are: have it run as a profit-making service; have it run as a non-profit service; or have it run as an adjunct to some gov’t service. None of those choices is automatically going to be on the side of the angels, so to speak. A quick look at the realities of non-profits shows that while there are many that give good value for the money many more are simply engines for making excellent salaries for a few people while taking advantage of the various non-profit laws. Likewise, a government bureaucracy can end up a tar-baby, and may end up becoming a de-facto government enforced monopoly, if they end up contracting things out to a private company as can often happen.
Simply because a service is run for a profit doesn’t make it evil. For that matter, the ethical issues here bother me less than the way that ETS has what seems, often, like a state-sponsored monopoly, where the students pay ETS for the privelege of being guinea pigs for the next generation of tests.
If you argue that the service is gaining value from these student’s work and not reimbursing them, you may well have a point. But finding an honest value, and punitive fines if awarded, shouldn’t be done on the basis of solely whether the service is run for a profit. By that argument, you seem to be arguing that it’s okay for non-profits or the government to steal intellectual properties - since they aren’t profiting from it.
I like this comment someone made in Marc Fisher’s online chat today here:
High school computer teacher who uses Turnitin here.
when Turnitin finds a match to an online source, it will show me, side by side, the text the student submitted along with the archived version of the online source, with the matching words and sections highlighted. I get a percentage score for each source (how much of the student’s paper matches text in that source), and an overall percentage score (how much of the student’s paper matches other sources). It’s not perfect, but it’s a fairly sophisticated algorithm. It’s not without its flaws. It doesn’t seem to keep up too well with Wikipedia, the number one source of student info these days, for better or for worse. Still, so many other pages crib from Wikipedia now, it usually catches it from another site.
In addition to telling me if the student deliberately plagiarized, it lets me know if they inadvertantly plagiarized or incorrectly cited (Quotes without citations, cited quotes that should have been unquoted paraphrases due to rewording by the paper’s author, etc.) Learning how to make proper fair use of others’ material is also an important set of skills the students need to learn, and Turnitin helps make easy.
As far as its submitted paper archive, if Turnitin finds a matching source in there, it tells me what school the paper was submitted to, and when. If I try to click on those source links to compare the actual text side by side, I get instead a message informing me that I need to contact the copyright holder to get a copy of it for myself.
If it’s a paper from my own school, I can look at it directly however. The first student to submit the text will receive a percentage-match score relative to other sources. The second student will get a score based on the other sources PLUS the first student’s paper.
Plagiarism is rampant. Really. Think of how bad it could possibly get in your mind, and multiply that by about 20. In our own eyes, we are doing our students a favor nailing them, when we do, for intellectual dishonesty while they’ll still just get a suspension, rather than let it go until they get nailed in college or in the workplace and be blackballed forever. If Turnitin is done away with, there will be no tools for teachers and professors to even think of keeping up with the scale of the problem until some newer, legal system arrives. Academic integrity will be right out the window.
I think there is an issue of consent to use intellectual property here, however, and it probably does need to go to court to get resolved. We inform all of our students in the course syllabus that Turnitin will be used, just because some of our parents are worried about their student using the internet at all, but I don’t know if enrollment in the class legally constitutes permission once that information is disseminated.
I think a good prosecutor can destroy the credibility of these students and their stated concern over intellectual property rights, though. Just ask them, under oath, how many songs on their iPod have been paid for. :eek:
I’ll be sure to inform everyone who graduated before turnitin.com existed that their degrees aren’t worth much because academic integrity was “right out the window.”
My goodness. The state should hire you immediately, you have just made the perfect argument. I’m positive there’s no one who could ever refute it.
I’m wondering whether the whole reason the kids copyrighted their work was to launch the lawsuit. Copyrighting schoolwork is hardly a norm and having it stored in Turnitin’s database actually protects one’s work from being plagiarized by others.
I have no opinion regarding how the lawsuit will play out, but I find that I am a bit suspicious of the motives of the plaintiffs.
Copyrighting one’s material is not something that one must “do.” Simply recording one’s words/thoughts/creative material of whatever nature in a fixed medium is sufficient to produce copyright. Now, one can register the copyright, to gain the benefit of additional protections. But in general, as soon as a student writes his or her paper, it’s copyrighted, without further action.
I understand how cheating works. 
I thought Thudlow was saying that the site would prevent dishonest students from cheating off the honest student. Now I realize he’s saying it protects honest students by stopping the dishonest ones from cheating together.
The professor informed you of the arrangement and you agreed to it, which is an important difference. He also wasn’t profiting from using your work, which this site does, or reproducing it without your permission.
The issue is not the tools available, but the attitude of the current students.
The ability to recognize sarcasm is also an important skill to develop in the course of one’s social development.
Regardless of the motives of the plaintiffs, I think it is a point of law that should get played out. I’m curious, myself, how it will. I can see compelling arguments on both sides, actually.
NO! This is the problem. TII.com is making money by archiving my paper. They advertise “100,000,000 papers archieved”; but those are not their papers. They are using the archived intellecual property of millions of students to make money - and that is copyright infringement (at least in my book). I’m sorry but TII.com is making money using something I wrote.
I’m an honest student who has written my fair share of papers. None of them has made me a dime, fuck TII.com if they are going to make them money.
Very true. On the other hand, your ability to attend college is a privelege. If you want to make sure that turnitin never gets a dime off your intellectual property, you can guarantee that by not attending an institution of higher learning. I remember back in the day an adjunct I knew saying that the worldwide web would open heretofore unexplored vistas of plagiarism. Perhaps the schools could simply prohibit using the web on campus, and require students to live on campus. And get up for chapel every morning at 7.
Except of course there are high school students involved in this lawsuit. Last time I checked, high school was compulsory.
Cheating is hardly new. 30 years ago, when I was in grad school, we wrote a program to compare Pascal programs to detect copying, by looking at the usage of variables. We caught some people also. But it’s a lot easier to do now, so more people will do it. if no one cheated today, do you think Turnitin would be a viable proposition.
And thanks, scotandrsn for the info on how it works.
After thinking, I realized that TII is probably not violating any copyright laws. Why? Because they are not making copies. If no copy is made, no copyright is violated.
Ah, but your paper is on their server. That copy was made. True, but who made that copy? You did, and you’re the copyright holder. You can legally make copies of any work you created.
At most, Turnitin will quote small portions of work that the copyright holder has uploaded to their site. That would probably come under Fair Use.
Turnitin does not require you upload papers into their database, so you can’t get them for that. You might go after the school for requiring TII, but they can just say that the upload is a condition of the course, much like telling a student to make copies of their paper to hand out to the class.
This won’t get very far; I’d be surprised if it came to trial.
Do ALL teachers/professors who use turnitin.com require their students to individually upload their own papers? Or do some do it themselves? I know I’ve certainly uploaded my own papers, but I’ve also had classes which said the site was used where I did not upload any papers.
Yes, I’m aware cheating existed before the internet. The statement was made that without turnitin, academic integrity would be out the window. So I’m wondering how, for example, scotandersn’s degree means squat, since the site likely didn’t exist when the degree was granted.
I think a site like turnitin.com is a great idea – if it’s being done legally. If it’s not being done legally, tweak it to make it legal. But I think it’s laughable to say that if the site were to go under or be declared illegal or whatever, that academic integrity would cease to exist. It reminds me of the question in GQ the other day about “How could a cop or regular person resist taking large sums of money in a drug bust?”
When it comes to what is or is not copyright infringement, it’s not what’s in your book that counts. Which is why it’ll be interesting to see how this lawsuit turns out. I think OtakuLoki already addressed the profit issue pretty well.
But don’t you see the irony in protesting that they’re using your intellectual property to make money, when the sole specific way they’re doing that is to make sure nobody else claims your work as their own?
As for your papers not having made you a dime—if you think they’re worth something, you’re still free to try to get someone to pay you for them, so they can publish them in next year’s edition of Great Student Papers of the Year or wherever. If you expect someone to pay you for them so that they can turn them in in their own classes as their own work, though, you might have reason to be mad at turnitin.com for thwarting your plans.
That might be slightly unreasonable.