Serendipity35

I read several postings in the past week about how TurnItIn (the subscription online antiplagiarism service) has arrived at Harvard.

A story in The Harvard Crimson states that instructors in one sociology course will use it as part of a a new pilot program run by Harvard’s Instructional Computing Group.

"The one Harvard class that is piloting the anti-plagiarism service TurnItIn is Sociology 189, “Law and Social Movements.” Assistant Professor of Sociology Tamara Kay, who teaches the course, said she has experienced problems with academic misconduct in the past.

“One of the most distressing aspects of plagiarism for professors is that if students are copying the work of others, they are not learning—and [professors] are first and foremost committed to their students’ intellectual growth,” Kay wrote in an e-mail.

According to Kay, few professors have time to catch students who plagiarize if they are focused on “helping students learn to write more effectively and giving them constructive feedback.”

TurnItIn is a software system that searches for similarities between work submitted by faculty or their students to the service and text from an expansive database of billions of Web pages, academic journals, and - the most controversial aspect of the service - previous submissions by students from any subscribing schools. Those schools include NJIT, Rutgers, U of Maryland, Georgetown, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, institutions in Australia, Canada, Egypt, Lebanon, New Zealand, Shanghai, and the U.K. There are even a few U.S. high schools that have subscribed.

Until this past summer, I was Co-Administrator of the service for our campus. During the past four years I did plenty of presentations for faculty and at several conferences on using the service. One of the things I would always try to stress was that it was best used not just as a "gotcha" tool to catch plagiarists, but to help your students understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.

I encouraged faculty to have their students create accounts and submit their own papers (many faculty selectively submit on their own only "suspect" papers - which doesn't really utilize the service fully) and to allow students to submit drafts (there are settings in Turnitin to allow this) to check papers before they submit for a grade.

I was concurrently on the NJIT Honor Commission and I was convinced that there were fairly simple steps that faculty could take to discourage cheating and plagiarism. We began to collect that information at integrity.njit.edu.

• Use Turnitin
• Be very up front about it - tell students on day 1, make it part of the syllabus. I believe that being clear that integrity is important to you and that you will check and pursue instances of cheating and plagiarism is a deterrent
• Have them create their own accounts, have them submit "test" papers and drafts and see what turns up
• Make this part of your course. (This was easier to have accepted by humanities faculty who were assigning research papers, than for engineering & computer science teachers who were not. In fact, many NJIT faculty have no interest in the service because they deal with code, math notation or, as with our School of Architecture, image files.)
• Like having students sign an honor code (NJIT does it during freshman orientation) and then having students sign a similar short statement on an exam, is a reminder of what is at stake if you cheat. Turnitin acts as another reminder each time they submit written work.
  

Ivy League colleges have not been subscribers to the service, so Harvard's pilot got some attention.

The most controversial aspect of Turnitin in the press and in any presentation I have done has been the retention of student work in its database. Some argue that students should be reimbursed since the company makes a profit off their work. Some say it is done wothout a student's consent (having students submit their own work helps on that issue - read the company's statement on copyright & privacy). Some faculty feel it creates distrust between them and students.

Princeton University announced this year that they wouldn't be using the software, citing their own honor code and the reasons above. Turnitin's founder, John Barrie, answered them in The Daily Princetonian, its student newspaper.

"Plagiarism is the capital crime in academics. There's no reason to believe that Princeton is a bastion of ethics. It's a shame that schools like Princeton aren't taking the lead because they're too concerned about what they are going to find. They are the top schools that would need to use it, because as the prestige of the institution increases, so does the amount of cheating."