Don't Turnitin.com

Besides debates about trust, copyright violations, and FERPA violations, many people are concerned because some teachers and graders upload student papers without deleting the student's name and other personal information from the paper.

The biggest complaints against the use of Turn It In! software are:

1) it is a violation of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA);
2) it is a violation of intellectual copyright protection;
3) it is a violation of confidentiality between student and teacher (what happens when someone breaches the Turn It In! database and exposes the writings of millions of students to the public? Writings that were supposed to be held confidential between students and their instructors? See the right-hand side bar for a brief list of major security breaches).

Besides ethical objections to Turn It In! the mass use of the software sets up an immediate adversarial relationship between students and teachers.

Plagiarism is a crisis in schools worldwide. The idea of a quick-click solution is appealing, however, as usual there is no easy solution to complicated problems. One thing is obvious, for Universities to abdicate responsibility for the plagiarism problem to a for-profit corporation is simply shuffling it out of sight, it is not a cure.

The following is an excerpt about a student who fought against the use of Turn It In! at his school. He eventually won but it was not an easy fight. Retrieved August 26, 2006 from www.cbc.ca


*English Professor John Cook is against using Turn It In!* software.**	*Student Jesse Rosenfeld refused to submit his essay to the Turn It In!* corporation.**

"TORONTO - University students are between semesters right now, enjoying a bit of a reprieve from the stress of writing essays. But for one student, there's still a big stress weighing on his mind as he challenges the use of a counter-plagiarism website. Jesse Rosenfeld of McGill University in Montreal says he paid a big price for not submitting an essay to Turnitin.com. The company uses technology to scan papers for evidence of plagiarism. It compares submitted essays to a data bank of term papers, academic journals, and other sources. "I got a zero because I refused to submit my paper to Turnitin.com," says Rosenfeld of the essay he wrote for an economic development class, a required course for students in McGill's International Development Studies program. McGill and 28 other universities and colleges across the country subscribe to the website for a fee. The Canadian Federation of Students plans to start a campaign to convince universities to stop subscribing to the service. It wants schools to use traditional methods of plagiarizing protection, such as submitting first drafts of essays and more detailed bibliographies. "They treat all students as though they are presumed guilty until they're proven innocent, and frankly, we have a big problem with that," said Joel Duff, Ontario chair of the Canadian Federation of Students. "We're not out to catch people. We're out to give faculty assistance in doing their job." said Diane Schulman, the secretary of the academic council at Ryerson University in Toronto. Ryerson pays about $5,000 a year for the service and Shulman says it's just one of the tools the school is using to help prevent plagiarism. "Some of our faculty were looking for a tool that they could use to help them sort out when papers were copied from the internet." Still, not everyone on the faculty is using it. John Cook, the head of Ryerson's English department, says he doesn't want to introduce an assignment with such a warning against plagiarism. "I do not want to begin by talking about the horror that might happen. And it seems to me that that's what you have to do with a system like Turnitin." Cook says the move to use systems like Turnitin.com is part of a bigger problem in Canada's universities. "We've to some extent reached a kind of impasse in the university in which all that the student does is perform for evaluation, and the more an essay becomes simply a device for evaluation, the less significant it is as a device for learning." Rosenfeld has launched an appeal with McGill, hoping to get his grade changed.

A law student and a law school speak out against the use of Turn It In! . The following excerpt was retrieved from dailytoreador on August 26, 2006.

“In order to check new student papers against those already submitted to turnitin.com and its parent company, iParadigms, they must maintain copies of every student paper ever received. This includes copies of papers uploaded by professors without student consent.

Dan L. Burk, an internationally prominent authority on the law of intellectual property, who specializes in the area of cyberlaw, has this to say about turnitin.com. "Their fair use exemption from copyright liability is baloney." In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher of Education in May 2002, he offered three factors that establish their violation of copyright law, "The students' papers are completely copied, they are often creative works, as opposed to compilations of scientific facts. And they are being submitted to a commercial enterprise, not an educational institution."

Because of these concerns over intellectual property rights, schools such as UC Berkeley have not purchased subscriptions to the program. Turnitin.com sells itself as a repository of your papers. They are making money off of students' original works. Are you comfortable knowing that this company indefinitely keeps a copy of your original academic work for its own profit?

In their unending attempt to defend their copyright violations, turnitin.com and their legal staff offer the argument that the copy they retain is merely a "digital fingerprint" of your work. They claim this does not violate copyright law citing 17 USC § 102(b). What their legal document will not tell you is that while 102(b) withholds protection from abstract concepts, it does not withhold protection from digital copies of original works in their entirety.

In addition to the questionable legality of this program, it also has extreme potential to unjustly harm innocent students. With the submission of "tens of millions of student papers" already and approximately "20,000 new papers added every day" in addition to its current collection of 4.1 billion pages of Internet data, it is extremely likely that turnitin.com will find plagiarism where none has actually occurred.

Every idea or statement presented by a student, be it original or plagiarized, is likely to be present in this collection in some form. The supposed genius of this program is that it drafts a plagiarism report for the professor complete with source links and then leaves them with the power to make the final judgment call. The situation likely to follow may look something like this:

Prof: "Johnny, your statements regarding the Peloponnesian War look strikingly similar to those made by Billy, a student at the University of Alaska. Can you explain this?"

Johnny: "No Ma'am, I never read that obscure little paper and I do not know anyone who lives north of the Mason Dixon line."

Prof: "Johnny, you have no evidence as to the originality of your ideas. I am forced to conclude that you somehow colluded with Billy up in Alaska and have committed the unforgivable sin of plagiarism. You fail."

I do not mean to suggest professors will be unable to make reasoned judgments when presented with pages and pages of "potential plagiarism reports" but merely that error is likely to occur. Unfortunately, when such error does occur, students have no means of redress as the usage policy of turnitin.com contains an all-encompassing limitation of liability and indemnification policy.

Turnitin refuses to take responsibility for any monetary damages resulting from their program (for example, the cost you may incur when you are forced to defend yourself against false plagiarism charges). They also stipulate any dispute regarding copyright infringement must be settled through arbitration in Alameda County , California. Forget suing them for violating your intellectual property rights, use of the service forfeits that option.

I do not believe that the convenience of turnitin.com is worth the accompanying risk of punishing innocent students for so grave an infraction. I encourage you to fight for your rights of privacy and exclusive control of your original work. Academic integrity is not fostered by unethical and potentially illegal coercion. Texas Tech should join with universities committed to the rights of their students and just say no to turnitin.com.

- Amanda Terry, first-year law student from Fort Worth . © Copyright 2006 Daily Toreador”

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The following is an excerpt from mikesmit.com retrieved August 26, 2006 from www. mikesmit. com. This student's statements touch on many of the problems with Turn It In! and some of the reasons schools like UC Berkeley refuse to use the software.

"When Dalhousie introduced the service 4 years ago, it was done in the most abrupt, least respectful, most dictatorial process I have seen in 7 years. We were told our professors could use it, and if they chose to, we had to submit, or else. When we tried to ask questions, when we tried to raise our concerns, we were stonewalled, misled, led in circles, or asked to just accept it. After all, what did we have to hide? There was nowhere to go to ask questions, no contact person, and the logical suspects would refer us to other logical suspects in a university-wide game of duck, duck, goose.

Attempts to address these concerns falls short:

The first and most obvious is the intellectual property issue. I am in the process of filing two patents - it is not out of the question that students come up with creative ideas they wish to protect. Despite the unsubstantiated claims of TurnItIn that my property is stored "securely", as a technology, security, and privacy expert I simply do not believe that to be true. Over 200 security breaches have been reported by organizations more reputable than TurnItIn since California's breach disclosure law was passed earlier this year. What happens when TurnItIn is next? "We're sorry" won't help. Neither will the disclaimer of liability in their terms and conditions. Even a lawsuit filed to receive compensation will be ground-breaking, and as a student, am I really going to do that? I will simply suffer, comforted only by empty and now worthless promises.

Second, I object to the presumption of guilt. To be required to submit my paper, and to then allow my paper to be used to detect future cases of plagiarism, is demeaning. It implies that not only am I likely to be plagiarizing now, but I am likely to allow others to plagiarize my work. In most cases, a quick look at my paper would be sufficient to determine that I am talking about something that has never been talked about before - a new approach to privacy, a new approach to search engine querying. Why the presumption of guilt?

Third, I doubt the service's efficacy. In a series of test submissions, I found that even very, very minor alterations to text copied from a paper known to be in the database were sufficient to trick the system. TurnItIn.com has known properties. If it is so easily fooled, it loses both its deterrent value and its inherent value.

Additionally, I maintain a website where I write posts, whole pages, and even feature series about my areas of interest. In some cases, I have expanded on this work and passed it in for academic credit - which is not a violation of plagiarism rules. However, I know that the TurnItIn bot used to crawl my website (until I asked them to stop). A quick test revealed that my paper was flagged as being 10% plagiarized, simply because of the similarity between my paper and my website. A rare example? Perhaps, but in this world of blogging and instant online publishing, it may be more common than you think.

More worrisome is the natural tendency of people to trust computer systems as being accurate. The shortcomings of TurnItIn are rarely advertised; this, the student disciplinary committee may accept TurnItIn results as proof positive of plagiarism, as may professors or TAs. Using flawed and tainted evidence against a student is blatantly unfair to them.

Fourth, I still object to the inadequacy of the information provided to students. For those who are willing to look, there is a FAQ on the Dal website that is still very much in the tone of "Because we said so. Deal with it." I find it curt and dismissive - no mean feat when you remember that it is only a web page. And try going to the turnItIn..com website for information - you will find no fewer than four policy documents with varying applicability to different jurisdictions, and that appear to sometimes conflict. Students don't know their rights, do not know the implications, and no one is going out of their way to inform them. Rather, the approach is often "because we said so."

Fifth, the privacy implications are important. Although the site recommends not to submit any papers with personal information, in some cases this may be unavoidable. Even as a computer science student, I have used real-world stories to illustrate my point in my papers. I am sure the same could be said for social work students, for example.

Sixth, professors and TAs may very well grow complacent in the face of the program - only looking for plagiarism in papers with a 50% score or higher, say. This reliance on a system that is not accurate to begin with (see point #3) will not decrease the occurrences of plagiarism - in fact, it will do quite the opposite.

Seventh, it is quite possible to configure the service so that students never know what their "plagiarism score" was. This is completely and utterly unfair to students. They have a right to know the case against them. It can also be construed as their personal information, or information generated from their personal information, which they definitely have a right to access. Barring access is a recipe for trouble."