Rob,
Respectfully, I can't get around a few points about turnitin.
1. It reifies students as second-class citizens. No one else has to
put up with the presumption (YES, the presumption) that they may well
have cheated. Yes, "requirement" is very different than "presumption,"
but equally specious is the argument that one precludes the other so
that if it's "just" a requirement it can't be *based on* the presumption
of guilt. You could require students to undergo a lice inspection when
coming onto campus everyday. It would not technically presume any given
individual had lice. It would simply be based on a broader presumption
that in general, members of a particular group were likely to have lice.
(Your analogy to a passport signature doesn't hold because it doesn't
represent the same kind of requirement. A better anology would be if
the passport signature were scanned and run through a database of all
open criminal cases with handwriting sample evidence every time the
passport were used. Still not a great analogy but closer.)
2. It is outright theft. This company takes student papers without
compensation and uses them to turn a profit. Of course, maybe my
standards are too high. A history professor I had once in a
senior-level class habitually collected students' primary research and
published it as his own without attribution or credit. I thought that
was outright theft too. But I guess since we were only students (see pt
#1). . . .
3. This point has been made a billion times: if you've created an
assignment that allows for habitual plagiarism, maybe it's time to
create an assignment that doesn't.
4. Your own point about gaps in turnitin's coverage shows simply one
tiny crack among thousands. Anyone who thinks that turnitin is a good
blanket way to catch plagiarism is living in a dream world. It's
searching only a tiny sample of what's out there, and it's laughing all
the way to the bank doing it. As most plagiarism hunts do, turnitin is
pretty much only catching the *stupid* cheaters.
Again respectfully, I don't understand how you can say that you don't
see your job as catching cheaters, and that you "don't especially like
turnitin," and still apparently be of the opinion not just that the
student's reasoning is specious (of course at some points it is) but
that turnitin isn't such a bad thing -- to the extent that you
apparently use it quite a bit. 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?
This post keeps growing so I should stop it here. (In fact, I haven'
been able to include Rob's original post because of the line cap.)
Cheers --
Doug Downs
Teaching Fellow
Communication Consultant, College of Engineering
University of Utah
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