My goodness, you'd think I'd sided with the devil, sold my soul, and all that
by the flurry of moral indignation regarding turnitin. (Actually with a group
of academics, there'd probably be less worry over my soul than my purported
pedagogical misstepping). Ah well, always happy to be the Casll's sh*t
disturber. (Gee will the spam filters let that through?)

I find Natasha's quote from Carbone the most compelling argument regarding
turnitin's unethical use of student papers, and to be honest, one that I never
considered. In fact, it is far more compelling than any of the student's
claims; and isn't a claim the student makes. I noticed in the CNN article
Marci pointed out that the founder of turnitin has some lame excuse
about "digital fingerprints" as opposed to papers, but I don't really
understand that. Turnitin is a simple word string search program, so somewhere
they've got to have those strings of words. The word string has to be at least
eight words long -- I tested this :) -- and if you break the string and then
follow it with a five word string, it won't pick up the following five. Thus,
the student who plagiarizes but changes every seventh word, even if he/she
just misspells it (or God forbid puts the u in "neighbor"), will not be
caught. That student's work is 100% original according to turnitin.  Thus, as
Doug points out:
>   Anyone who thinks that turnitin is a good
> blanket way to catch plagiarism is living in a dream world.
That was why I said I wasn't impressed with it as a tool.  It is as Doug noted
only useful for the stupid cheater.

This is why it was useful to me at the draft stage. It enabled me to work
specifically with students who were having trouble with source handling.

I also enjoyed another feature I forgot to mention. (Oh no, you think he's
admitting he likes it). What I found most interesting occurred when my
students submitted multiple drafts. The second draft was compared against the
original submission in the originality report. What was really exciting to me
was when a student's paper registered as being only 40% taken from that
source. It meant that at some level the student had revised 60% of the paper!
It gave me a quick snapshot of the student's level of revision, not a full
CTScan, but a rough idea. What was gratifying was how many of my class really
got the idea of revision. I don't credit turnitin for creating that situation,
but I was able to see it more "visually" than previously.

Now to take issue with some of my esteemed colleagues:
Natasha's point that "Those who understand and still do it -- as we all know,
they are doomed professionally, so they'll be punished more seriously than any
university can punish them, and I can hardly do anything about them" seems
like a washing of hands AND seems naive. Doomed professionally!??!? Copying
ideas is virtually always rewarded in the industrial sphere. Just consider any
lucrative computer program, and you can almost always find what it was ripped
off from (e.g. MS grammar check ripped of the Flesch-Kincaid Readability index
created for the US military). Like Natasha, I try to instill ethical practice
in my students through education; however, I can do something about those
cheaters. I can give them a shake now while the stakes are low. Unfortunately,
cheating is a well-established part of Engineering culture. I have even had
students describe it as a necessary survival skill. Others' cheating is
accepted as long as "it doesn't hurt me." In fact, students confide in me
their plans to cheat or who else has cheated -- as the writing guy I'm viewed
as somehow outside the regular scope of their lives. I certainly encourage
ethical behaviour, I've been known to pull out the Professional Engineers of
Ontario code of ethics, but I don't fool myself into believing I have
overwhelming success. I wonder, though, if a student who would tell me that he
intends to cheat isn't actually looking for something by which to set his
(usually its a he) moral compass, and hope my responses have been appropriate.

As for Doug's lice metaphor, it's a good one, but the nit can be picked two
ways. When my kids went to camp last summer, as they arrived, they were
subjected to a lice check by the camp nurse. Every kid went through it. Was
there a presumption of "guilt"? No, there was an integrity standard (in this
case for health) that had to be upheld. If my kids had lice, I would have had
to take 'em back home. No condemnation, it's just they couldn't stay and play.
Perhaps we should see turnitin the same way: If the "originality report" comes
back in the red (yes they use this colour scheme) then the paper can't stay
and play. I still don't see this as presumption of guilt or reifying the
student.

Finally, Doug said:
> Wouldn't a better "learning tool" be to
> have a half-hour conference where students bring in their sources and
> profs review how the sources were used in the paper?
The assumption you've made here Doug is that someone using turnitin didn't
also do that. The assumption is the same one as that made by the student from
McGill and CFS (see the CNN article): if you use turnitin you must be cutting
corners. And that is precisely the point I wasn't making, or at least I didn't
think so. I know I explicitly said that it was useless for cutting corners.
Why does the half-hour conference preclude also using the filter?

No, if I'm going to turn out turnitin, I'll do it based on Carbone's
persuasive point and based on its ineffectiveness, not due to turnitin's
profit motive or that it can be viewed as somehow tarnishing the quality of my
teaching.

so with best regards to all,

Rob

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