Talk:Turnitin

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[edit] Reword so the positions on the service are not simply students vs. teachers

Many of the sentences seem to imply that all students are opposed to the service and all educators are for it. This is certainly not true. As an educator, I see the service as not only an invasion of privacy but profiting from the works of students. Some careful rewording throughout to make it clear that opinons on the service are not so easilly divided among students and educators.


This article needs a section on criticisms, specifically the culture it creates of teachers gleefully "catching" students at cheating. Seems hostile.

[edit] Turnitin is not responsible for failing students- teachers are

"Many teachers that use the service will automatically give a failing grade to a paper that is not submitted through Turnitin;"

It is not correct that Turnitin is in any way involved with the punishment meted out by teachers who catch students plagiarising. If a teacher fails a student, it is done without any involvement of the company Turnitin. This much should be obvious. Who would permit an outside party to set guidelines for academic behavior? Only teachers are responsible for the consequences of catching their students plagiarising.

Unfortunately, this statement is true. While this is not strictly Turnitin's fault, its use has encouraged such behavior. æle ✆ 20:59, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

"This article needs a section on criticisms, specifically the culture it creates of teachers gleefully "catching" students at cheating. Seems hostile."

Also, it is not neutral to say that Turnitin promotes a culture of gleeful catching of students. Surely there is no glee in finding out a student has been cheating. The advent of paper mills on the internet make searching for plagiarism an important issue for schools. This Wikipedia article should reflect the growing awareness of the issue of plagiarism amongst students, teachers, and professional writers. Turnitin's approach to the issue of plagiarism should be portrayed in a factual manner instead of a non-neutral manner such as "gleeful".

I would urge for a rewrite of the article to reflect student concerns vs. teacher concerns of the need for Turnitin, taking into account student intellectual property and privacy concerns, as well as teacher concerns about high tech cheating in the academic environment.

Cutter20 19:40, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Plagiarism in college and high school, Internet plagiarism

I am adding a section to identify academic integrity and student honesty as a major concern for teachers.

Plagiarism is in fact an issue for all professional writers, and that includes students when they are required to produce original work. Novelists, journalists, editors, and even some visual artists such as cartoonists all deal with the issue of plagiarism in some form.

Since identifying the source of matching text on the Internet or within a student database is the goal of Turnitin, this method of identifying material after it has been submitted can be effective in alerting teachers to signs of plagiarism. While this is the source of much controversy by students, it is becoming widely accepted by teachers and school administrators as a necessary way to identify plagiarism.

They are using Turnitin and similar services because of the industry of so-called "custom-writing" or free term paper websites on the Internet, which advertise term papers to students. These websites, known as "paper mills", can be a nightmare of cheating for any teacher at the secondary or higher education level. Students online are assuredly aware of these types of websites.

In the American school system, students are expected to produce original written work, usually in the form of essays. The Internet can be a great source of information but culture demands that works should be cited and credit should be given to the original sources. This is how professional writing communities also view the attribution of original work. At the high school and college level it is the case that essays can easily be copied or bought off the Internet and this undermines the purpose of requiring original work from students.

Every school has their own policy in dealing with plagiarists. When a school decides to fail a student on an assignment or in a class, that is the decision made by the school and not Turnitin or any other tool that acts similarly. While the penalties for plagiairism can be strict, they represent the degree of seriousness with which schools and writers in general approach plagiarism.

Cutter20 23:08, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neutral POV

I have tried to edit this article to make it factual without diminishing concerns about controversy.

Cutter20 00:28, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Legal/Ethical issues

I have moved this paragraph to discussion:

"One issue that has been the topic of discussion among faculty is whether or not it is ethical or legal to grant Turnitin license for free use of the works of students (as spelled out in Turnitin's End User License Agreement) without their consent, or with consent that has been given under questionable circumstances (as a condition of enrollment, for instance)."

I think this description may be problematic. First, it does not specify which specific faculty are discussing the ethical or legal issues with Turnitin. Second, even faculty debates about legality are irrelevant because Turnitin functions as a lawful company, not one in a perpetual gray zone. Third, these issues are addressed in the section of the article titled "Student paper database".

If there are real concerns about legality or ethics, instead of just supposition, there should be at least one court case or outside source to reference. Currently, anecodtes of faculty discussions are not the same as relevant legal proceedings or informed studies on the subject. Ultimately this paragraph demonstrates a non neutral point of view that Turnitin may not be ethical or legal.

Turnitin's widespread adoption by schools, barring any specifically cited evidence that Turnitin is unethical/illegal, should be sufficient proof that Turnitin is widely used by schools without breaking any laws or violating student's rights. I would hope this Wikipedia article remains factual and informative, without fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Cutter20 19:47, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Students don't have rights, or rather, they have rights, but these rights are consistently ignored. Teachers violate them every day. No one but the students cares, but the students cannot vote, so it doesn't change. At a guess, I'd say that this issue won't be fixed utnil somebody figures out children are people too; but then people n power are rarely capable of that much thought. --67.67.216.182 06:20, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Response:

The above paragraph was not meant as an indictment of Turnitin, and was not intended to promote fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The lack of documentation is the result of laziness, not bad intent. Mea culpa.

For documented acknowledgement of this issue as a concern among those in academe (not merely faculty, I suppose), refer to the section in this document from Indiana University entitled "Issues Concerning Plagiarism-Detection Software", which indicates concern over the protection of students' intellectual property rights in regard to use of Turnitin software.

Or, refer to this thread in a forum on New Jersey's Higher Education Network.

This ethical question and the concern of faculty over it has even been acknowledged on Turnitin's web site, under #3 (the Turnitin web site has undergone a recent design change, and this document is no longer on the current site). Turnitin makes a case for why use of its software is ethical, which can be judged on its merits by the reader.

Please note that the questions over the ethics or legality of use of Turnitin in a university setting do not imply that Turnitin is itself doing anything unethical or illegal. As a private company, Turnitin has the right to dictate terms of use. However, that does not change the fact that the granting of license to use a work by a party other than the author of that work poses both an ethical and a legal question that is being debated in the academic community.

It is one thing for a student to willingly submit their own work to Turnitin with the understanding that they are granting Turnitin license to use their work; it is another entirely for faculty to do so without the students consent, or to mandate the consent of the students. Whether or not the latter case is ethical or legal is the topic of debate, and it has implications beyond Turnitin. However, it is the use of Turnitin that is sparking this debate, and that is why the entry is listed under Turnitin.

On a side (and semantic) note, the fact that there is no specific legal case history does not invalidate the question, it merely indicates that the question remains unanswered. Also, legal case history has no bearing on ethics, as an act may be both fully legal and entirely unethical.

.

Thank you for posting your comments here. I still feel that discussion of the controversy around Turnitin should be handled in a neutral fashion. This controversy has already been covered in the "Student paper database" section of the article. Also please sign your comments by using the tilde key. Cutter20 22:23, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

One further comment, and that is that recently the CEO of Turnitin appeared on National Public Radio to discuss cut-and-paste plagiarism. When asked by a student caller whether Turnitin maintains the "right" to student papers after they are submitted, the CEO said that Turnitin does not infringe on the student's rights to profit from their work, and that using the paper to prevent further plagiarism of that paper falls under "fair use" [1].

Also, with regards to Indiana University's 2003 study of plagiarism checkers, this more recent news story [2] lists an IU campus as a current Turnitin user, so clearly the university overcame legal and ethical objections as stated in the 2003 study. As the Turnitin Wikipedia article mentions, schools that allow Turnitin to store and scan student papers do so with the intention of breaking the habit of students to "recycle" papers, and to combat paper mills. The notion that Turnitin is illegal or unethical is a fallacy, but feel free to debate the notion here as a side discussion as long as we keep the main article neutral and unbiased. Cutter20 22:56, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Text match and deterrence

I am reverting back some of the changes made by Billso. Information about types of papers that can be submitted to Turnitin should not replace information about how Turnitin is used by teachers and students, but can be used to supplement it. Billso also made a change to the article to say that students are able to submit the same paper twice without detection:

This database does not prevent the use of one student's paper by another student. The indexing and analysis services offered by TurnItIn act as a deterrent to plagiarism.

This statement is incorrect, as two students who submit the same paper will have the matching text identified by Turnitin. This is the very reason why the company maintains a student paper database. I have also moved the deterrent link because elsewhere the article says that Turnitin is used as a deterrent. Beyond its use as a deterrent, the program allows teachers to enforce their policies through text matching between student papers.

Also, the company spells its name with a capital T and lower case everything else, as shown on the website. I would welcome changes and additions to the article as long as they are factual and do not replace other relevant information about the program. Cutter20 21:19, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] MSVU and Princeton not using it

I think that in the Views of Turnitin the Mount Saint Vincent University and Princeton viewpoints should be added.

MSVU ban

Princeton decision

Demexii 00:14, 26 May 2006 (UTC)Demexii

Removed this line: Others suggest that Turnitin's archiving and commercial exploitation of student work without students' permission or royalty payments constitutes a breach of copyright law.[3]

There is no way that students are being exploited by having their papers scanned by Turnitin. The schools pay for the service and they make the decision to submit student papers to the database, making Turnitin more effective. There is an option in the Turnitin software that will prevent student papers from being added to the database, at the discretion of the school. Cutter20 19:05, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I beg to differ. All student papers submitted to turnitin become part of its data base. Its huge data base of student papers is proprietary. The size of this data base is part of its marketing. It cannot but be argued that Turnitin is deriving financial benefit from those papers without compensating the students who created them and continue to own copyright to them.
They will lose the first lawsuit that gets filed against them ... I guarantee it.
And you might want to see what a legal expert in http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i36/36a03701.htm one of the externally-linked articles] has to say:

(Barrie) also denies that the company is infringing on student copyrights -- even if the students aren't forewarned that their papers will be handed over to Turnitin.com -- arguing that the service is simply making "fair use" of student works.

It's an unusual rationale for commercial activity. Traditionally, the "fair use" exception to copyright law is cited by scholars who copy passages from books for their research, or by instructors who copy magazine articles for classroom use.

"In no way do we diminish students' ability to market their work," says Mr. Barrie.

"Since we vet for originality, it increases the marketability of the work and increases the confidence a publisher might have in publishing that work."

Under copyright law, the fair-use exception is easier to justify if freely distributed copies of a document are not expected to threaten its commercial value.

Dan L. Burk, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in intellectual property, says of Mr. Barrie's fair-use defense: "That's baloney."

As many as three factors undermine the argument, the professor says: 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. "To run a database, you've got to make a copy, and if the student hasn't authorized that, then that's potentially an infringing copy," says Mr. Burk.

CTTOI, this should be in the article. Will edit appropriately.
And BTW, Cutter20, not only did you have no justification for removing that line, what you did say above amounted to a POV edit. I am restoring it. Daniel Case 02:53, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Daniel, thank you for the lesson. I will take it to heart. I am not trying to do a POV edit. This page has been vandalized many times by people who are upset with Turnitin. Everything I have made in regards to editing this page is in the interest of neutral facts. I have tried to provide context to the controversy surrounding Turnitin's student database, as well as student groups that protest the use of Turnitin. This article should also state why teachers and their schools subscribe to the company. Please understand that I only want this article to be neutral and factual. Cutter20 07:10, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Of the recent changes you have made, changing "views of Turnitin" to "Controversies" might be construed as a POV edit. While I welcome adding a criticism section to the page, does the article need to iterate the position of Turnitin critic Prof. Burk? This page tends to get a lot of angry claims that Turnitin is violating the law. Maybe there should be an entirely separate page to discuss all the criticisms or controversies surrounding the use of Turnitin. Cutter20 07:31, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

What you're talking about is called a POV fork and it is, as that page shows, controversial. Now, granted, we have a whole category of such articles, but I support their creation only where a criticism section accounts for more than 50% of the article length or it threatens the stability of the article. Or both (which is often the case).
We have "Controversies" sections in many other articles ... it's not considered POV.
Yes, iterating Burk's analysis here is IMO necessary. It's sourced and it was in direct response to Turnitin's claims of fair use. Having it in in such a way is probably likely to satisfy the concerns of any upset vandals who come here. Daniel Case 22:04, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] References

I have created a proper references section for the article. However, this entailed removing a whole paragraph generally praising Turnitin, because none of the links cited worked anymore. If someone can find those sources, or equivalents (the Duke student paper, the CBC, the Melbourne News Herald etc.) it can go back in. Daniel Case 03:09, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

OK, I am mostly in agreement with the way the page looks now. Perhaps Controversies and Criticisms could be combined somehow. Also this page would benefit from a legal section to discuss any legal challenges involving Turnitin.

Thank you for the constructive edits, Daniel Case. Cutter20 06:47, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

When there are actual legal challenges, then they can be discussed in a section. We don't deal in hypotheticals here. Daniel Case 22:02, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criticisms of Turnitin

"Students are often required to submit essays directly to the website themselves. This has been a source of one of several criticisms of the software, with some students refusing to do so in the belief that requiring it constitutes a presumption of guilt. "

Two things need to be corrected here.

1, Students are not always required to submit the papers themselves, sometimes their teachers submit them in bulk format.

2, The fact that students submit their essays directly themselves is not the source of critcism. It is that the essays are submitted to Turnitin at all!

I will make the appropriate edits to clarify these points.

One other thing to note is that it is schools that decide how to use Turnitin, and Turnitin does not require students to submit papers to them. That is to say, teachers and schools make the policy.

Cutter20 05:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I am making slight updates to make this page more readable. References to deterrence and paper mills have been moved to the top of the page and to the classroom section respectively. Cutter20 08:33, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Just to be very clear! There are two main types of criticisms of Turnitin: There is the school policy of using Turnitin, and there is the way Turnitin functions itself.

School Policy: Mandatory student submission to Turnitin. This is done at the school's discretion because Turnitin provides an option that will prevent student essays from being fully screened and submitted to the database, if a school wants to use that option.

Turnitin's function: Student Database, privacy concerns, intellectual property infringement, webcrawling the Internet, what have you.

I am saying this because it is important to make the distinction between criticism of the school, in their use of Turnitin, and the product Turnitin itself.

Cutter20 08:52, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm moving this line to the discussions section:

  • Turnitin is used to limit the effectiveness of paper mills and custom writing services.

I can't quite find the right place for this. The main use of Turnitin, in addition to preventing copying between students and from the Internet, is against paper mills. This sounds like it should be part of the classroom integration section but possibly somewhere else. Cutter20 08:58, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion of GradeMark

This article is far too focused on IP issues and student comments about the service.

I'd like this article to include a discussion of the GradeMark feature. As an educator, I use GradeMark to mark and return papers within TurnItIn.com. The plagiarism analyis is a nice deterrent, but I've come to see that GradeMark is a valuable feature that I simply can't get in WebCT 6.

billso 23:21, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Watch the headlines. Things are about to get very interesting.

Watch for news about Turnitin in the next few days. I have it on very good authority that they are attempting to sue the students from McLean High School for a good deal of money. I don't know the particulars.

[edit] Vandalism by Pakistani Paper Mill Owner

I propose a ban on the Pakistani IP string 124.29.*.* because of incessant vandalism. I suggest that everyone look at the edit history of this article, as well as the "Plagiarism" article. I have traced the origin of this IP string, and it is directly connected to the owners of the following paper mills in Pakistan:

Allcustompapers.com Flashpapers.com GhostPapers.com Mybookreportspace.com Mydissertationspace.com Myessayspace.com Mythesisspace.com Papergator.com Paperscribe.com Termpaperstop.com

In fact, if you look at the editing history of 124.29.198.150, you will see that this same Pakistani paper mill owner not only vandalizes, but has also posted links to FlashPapers.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/124.29.198.150

This person dislikes Wikipedia's "Turnitin" and "Plagiarism" articles for an obvious reason: they hurt his shady business. He has incessantly vandalized both articles. For this reason, I propose a ban on the entire IP string 124.29.*.*. How do I make this an official "issue" for discussion? 67.188.1.224 22:13, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

It's a little early for blocking right now. I reverted the last edits by 124..., and put a message on the IP talk page to ask him to discuss this. Academic Challenger 02:51, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that's right, and it's a little unusual for an anonymous user to be so certain about what's going on.... Zz414 03:19, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. Our anonymous friends need to try talking this out instead of continuing their long-running-but-slow-simmering edit war. Perhaps semi-protection might be enough to "flush them into the open" and get them talking? --ElKevbo 05:15, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead and register yourselves with a username, that way if you're making a lot of changes everyone can see if there is any agenda. The Turnitin page is often vandalized by all kinds of different people with strong opinions on the subject of plagiarism. Cutter20 07:09, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

ElKevbo and Cutter20, if either of you can point out to me where in Wikipedia's TOS a username is required, I will gladly ablige and create one. For the record, my IP address is LESS anonymous than a random username. 67.188.1.224 23:31, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] question about copying off of yourself

Hello, I'm just starting out with Turnitin, and I was wondering if Turnitin will flag my assignment if it contains parts copied from a previous assignment that I turned in using the same account. In other words, will Turnitin accuse me of plagiarism if I copy off parts of my own previous assignments? Thanks very much for your reply anyone Benlumberkid 01:04, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

TurnItIn may flag your work. However, if the work is yours, your teacher/professor should take note of that. Most universities of colleges in my experience encourage students to site themselves. There is a catch to this, however. You should not just lift things from your previous work. Rather, you should quote from and cite your work just like you would anyone else. SkipperClipper 03:09, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] question regarding treatment of Unix Users

Hello, I am a student taking college courses from the internet division of a college. I am also an avid computer programmer, and I use Unix based operating systems. As some may know, TurnItIn appears to be written with Windows users in mind and is hosted from Windows-based servers. Every time I submit an assignment to TurnItIn, it is marked as "unknown." POSIX-compatible operating systems do not encode files specifically as binary or text (a truly unnecessary feature, in my assessment), as Windows does. I recently received an F on a pivotal assignment and the professor refused to grade the assignment until TurnItIn successfully rated it, giving me an F average in the class. TurnItIn does not appear to support non-binary files. I resubmitted the assignment successfully from a Windows computer (still not graded yet); the same file. This is (hopefully unintentional) antitrust in my book. TurnItIn will not accept files from POSIX-compliant systems.

[edit] Addressing Neutrality in the Opening Section

I have added the sentence at the end of the third paragraph. I understand I offer no statistics to back this up, but as an educator in a high school setting, I know that my school division and most of my colleagues do not presume guilt, but are truly interested in educating students. Given the amount of information students may write in any pape and the number of students papers, teachers are hard pressed to highlight examples from an individuals work that should be sited. Often we'd have no way of knowing it the work was original or plagiarized. SkipperClipper 03:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Does turnitin spider wikipedia?

Does anyone know? It can be disallowed. http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html

Something like:

User-agent: turnitinbot

Dissallow: /

in the robots.txt Leafyplant 11:52, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

dosent look like we do http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt Leafyplant 11:58, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Apparently Skewed Focus

Controversy over this topic is important, but this article fails to accurately address the perspective of turnitin. It is mostly about the criticisms of turnitin, and I found it to be somewhat lacking in description as to what turnitin.com actually does.

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