During a stint as a distance-education professor at a very good program associated with a major university, I was required to use Turnitin.com as a matter of policy to check for student plagiarism. For the most part, the tool only showed what I could already find readily on my own from observing shifts in language and ideas (style, terminology, expert stances). However, it did provide me with an easily compiled source of evidence to demonstrate plagiarism. Also, given its database of previous student papers, it could find cases of plagiarism I couldn’t (and did, although much less frequently). That is, the reuse of student-written papers.
Did it create an atmosphere of distrust? I’m not certain. Student emotions are sometimes not easily read over a distance.
Did it create a greater sense of accountability? I’m uncertain about that, too. I had so many cases of plagiarism in one semester — despite all students having been explicitly (by policy) informed of the tool’s use — that the Dean’s Office (which handled them) began to push back on further submissions (although I continued, of course, to keep turning them in as they came). Yet, I do continue to believe that plagiarism detect by whatever means is important, to create teaching opportunities both in terms of proper acknowledge of others’ work and professional ethics.
See what you think.
Software Catches (and Also Helps) Young Plagiarists
Escalation in Digital Sleuthing Raises Quandary in Classrooms 1
by Marc Parry / The Chronicle of Higher Education / 8 November 2011
The spread of technology designed to combat academic cheating has created a set of tricky challenges, and sometimes unexpected fallout, for faculty members determined to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms.
In the latest development, the company that sells colleges access to Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection program that checks uploaded papers against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal content, now also caters directly to students with a newer tool called WriteCheck, which lets users scan papers for plagiarism before handing them in.
Meanwhile, faculty members at some colleges are adopting a reverse image-search program called TinEye, which lets them investigate plagiarism in visual materials like photos and architectural designs.
Cheating is nothing new. But as the frontiers of academic policing continue to advance—some 2,500 colleges now use Turnitin—faculty members are being pushed to confront classroom conundrums: Should they scan all papers for plagiarism, and risk poisoning the classroom atmosphere? Should they check only suspicious texts, and preserve harmony at the risk of missing clever cheaters? Could Turnitin and technologies like it lead to more plagiarism, since professors might depend on their imperfect results rather than vigorously investigate suspicious material on their own?
To read more…
Image Source: article: Sarah Weeden, photographer
Last fall, for my first-year writing seminar on the history and mathematics of cryptography, I posted my students’ expository-writing essays on our course blog. The assignment had asked students to describe a particular code or cipher that we had not already discussed—how it came to be, how it works, how to crack it, who used it. They described more than a dozen codes and ciphers. It seemed a shame that I might be the only one to read such interesting content, so I asked the students to read and comment on two papers of their peers. The course blog provided an ideal platform for that task.
