By Aaron Chelliah
Contributing Writer
While Turnitin.com is an enticing alternative to manually checking papers, the site’s methodology has many moral and technical drawbacks which render it inappropriate for use at Mira Costa.
The website is also inneffective because teacher ignorance about how the system functions leaves students accused of plagiarism when they are innocent.
On the Turnitin.com website, it states that the originality report is only a tool and recognizes quotations, citations as unoriginal work, but many teachers fail to recognize this. Despite its convenience to teachers, iParadigms, the parent company of Turnitin.com, use of plagiarism laws misleads teachers into believing original work is plagiarized.
Turnitin.com has a large potion of the market share, having checked over 20 million papers according to its website.
iParadigms is a for-profit business. The company charges a flat fee for its service, which checks student papers against its database that includes over 24 billion archived web pages, 300 million copyrighted student papers, and 120 million articles according to the website. Using this, the site gives papers a “percent plagiarized score” for teachers to review.
Many students deplore use of the percentage as a “be all end all” of plagiarism because there are many factors that can attribute to the number.
Legitimately sourced references can heavily weigh into the percentage, especially if a student utilizes exact sources for a paper.
Many students believe when teachers rapidly look through these scores, the true meaning of the number may be lost for convenience’s sake, and the necessary human judgment is neglected. The resulting allegations of plagiarism are not based on students’ practices and create more problems than solutions.
Turnitin.com’s extensive database is one of its most appealing attributes, yet it is founded on a legal gray area. Every submission to Turnitin.com is individually copyrighted so it can then be cross-referenced against other works, but original authors receive little credit whatsoever for their work. Turnitin.com’s Terms and Service policy states that student’s work can remain in its database for future comparison, which has allowed iParadigms to take advantage of student work. This means that students cannot reuse their work because it is copyrighted, fighting a counter-intuitive battle against intellectual property.
Due to the mandatory nature of many Turnitin.com submissions, students are forced to give up their property, increasing the database and for iParadigms. It is due to this interpretation of the law that Turnitin.com has had multiple lawsuits file against them, according to the Washington Post.
The very company meant to restore ethical behavior to the academic world is a prime example of immorality within it. The aforementioned legality of iParadigm’s copyright model is questionable at best, but misleading use of the company’s service despite what is said in the terms of service is unacceptable. In a pilot initiative to test the Turnitin.com plagiarism software, the company took submissions from teachers and students who were not notified of their work being added to Turnitin.com’s corporate database, based on a study done by the University of Botswana. This is the very foundation upon which a ‘morally conducive’ service has grown for years.
Instead, teachers should use sites such as www.plagiarismdetect.com, which works similarly to Turnitin.com, but does not copyright submitted papers. Additionally, the $8 per month fee is far less than Turnitin.com, saving MBUSD money and preserving intellectual property.
iParadigms, the parent enterprise of Turnitin.com, is amoral with its use of copyright. This, and its technological problems, makes it a program that misleads teachers and misuses students ideas. MBUSD should not continue to use the service.
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