By Alec Lautanen
Theme Editor
In an academic environment where information is so accessible to students, the temptation to plagiarize others’ work is high. However, attempts to curb cheating must not come at the expense of students’ intellectual property.
Costa teachers actively try to deter and punish acts of academic dishonesty, and one of the most prevalent methods is Turnitin. It is a web service that searches for plagiarism by checking student-uploaded work against a database of other documents.
Unbeknownst to many, students forfeit their intellectual property rights and ownership of any ideas contained in their work when they upload it to Turnitin.
The parent company of Turnitin, iParadigms, states in its terms of use policy that by submitting content to the site, users give the company a “non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display [and] disclose” users’ content.
Submitting content to Turnitin is mandatory for many assignments, and students may fail projects if they do not upload work.
This situation leaves students in a vulnerable situation where they are forced to either sacrifice their ideas to a for-profit company or fail their school assignments.
The site’s terms of use policy goes on to state, “we are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the communications.”
Therefore, by submitting original work to the site, students give free reign to Turnitin to profit from their thoughts and ideas – hardly what an anti-plagiarism website should consider moral.
Student protest of the site has led many universities to reconsider their use of the service. McGill University in Montreal prohibited the mandatory use of Turnitin in 2005 and Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia banned the site outright the following year. Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton have made similar decisions in the United States.
The effectiveness of Turnitin has also been debated. The algorithm that the website uses only detects plagiarism in one way: word-for-word replicas of other work. If eight consecutive words in a submission match another document, the submission is marked as plagiarized.
This process is rendered completely useless if students opt to paraphrase content instead, which requires only a thesaurus and minimal ingenuity.
Faced with the option of failing an assignment or relinquishing ownership of their own ideas, most students will choose the latter. If students are determined to maintain intellectual property rights, they can copyright their work through the United States Electronic Copyright Office for $35, but even then the rights that students have are unclear.
There are many alternatives to Turnitin that are free and do not attempt to steal students’ original work. Article Checker and Plagiarism Checker are web services in which portions of assignments or entire papers can be compared to all other content on the internet.
Because content is only copied and pasted, these websites do not retain checked material and all ideas stay with the original paper.
At Mira Costa, although the administration doesn’t have a formal policy, it lacks an earnest effort to protect intellectual property. It should take a stronger stance for standing up for student rights.
While plagiarism is by no means an acceptable practice, there are certainly more moral and practical alternatives for its detection than Turnitin.
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