Plagiarism prevention: A full view
By Hannah Groah, Campus Life Senior Writer
April 12, 2007 | 4:23 p.m.
Ohio University is taking serious action against accusations of plagiarism and the newest weapon in the war on cheating is a Web site designed to quickly identify unoriginal work. However, with plagiarism, there are no clear answers.
The good
Turnitin.com is a Web site designed to effectively determine papers suspected of cheating by comparing them to a large database of previous student papers. Turnitin also promises to compare suspect papers against “billions” of Internet pages, journals and periodicals.
Professor Aaron Kelley said he uses Turnitin.com because “it takes a lot of guesswork out of plagiarism.” Kelley, who has been teaching at Ohio University for 11 years, said the Web site's large database sets it apart from other plagiarism-prevention software.
“They have everything," Kelley said. "I sometimes get matches from small community colleges in Florida."
Turnitin.com said they make no claim of guilt or innocence. Instead, they provide the educator with originality reports. These originality reports highlight suspicious text matches from student papers and provide sources from where the text was derived.
According to its Web site, Turnitin.com’s “plagiarism prevention is often so successful that institutions using our system on a large scale see measurable rates of plagiarism drop to almost zero”.
The bad
While Turnitin.com promises to drastically reduce plagiarism on campus, OU is not quite convinced. The Committee of Academic Integrity was formed for this current school year to gather information about plagiarism in Athens and to focus on identifying possible solutions for the problem.
Co-chair of the Committee, Professor Susan Sarnoff, said the Committee piloted the Turnitin software during winter quarter and found tests inconclusive. “We heard some very negative comments from teaching assistants and students,” Sarnoff said.
One of the complaints was over the workload of the program. Students were asked to turn in every draft of their papers. This seems to be a tedious process that was sometimes helpful but mostly just more work for already stressed students and teaching assistants. Sarnoff said she sees Turnitin as useful for dissertations and theses, but “for smaller assignments, it seems like a lot of work”.
Sarnoff said the Committee for Academic Integrity will continue testing the program next fall or possibly this summer in order to design a comprehensive honor policy for OU. “We don’t want to be the academic integrity police,” Sarnoff said.
Instead the committee is avoiding easy answers concerning plagiarism. “We can’t just say we’ll use Turnitin.com, and we’ll never have to deal with plagiarism again,” she said. “That would be rather stupid.”
Some professors find that most of the time Turnitin reports on plagiarism, the cheating is accidental. “In the majority of cases, there isn’t really any problem,” professor Jeffrey Anderson said. Instead, the plagiarism is accidental, with students either incorrectly citing quotes or working together on a paper.
Kelley agrees with Anderson that mistakes by students can be made. He also thinks part of the problem is students who do not fully understand the meaning of plagiarism. Kelley said our generation has a “copy-and-paste mentality,” but students need to be taught from the time that they are freshman that this mentality is dangerous. “Turnitin.com is necessary because we just want to make sure [the classroom] is an even playing field," he said.
However, Anderson is quick to explain that “there is a huge difference between working together and writing the same thing.” However, for the most part, Turnitin is a good system that is necessary for such a large student body. “It helps catching plagiarism, accidental or otherwise,” he said.
The ugly
Sophomore Rob Jones, whose name has been changed, does not quite fit into accidental plagiarism, but he does not quite fit into the “otherwise” category either. Fall quarter of this academic year, Jones decided to take a film class completely unrelated to his major. “I was interested, so I took it,” he said. The class turned out to be interesting, but for all the wrong reasons.
“The way I saw it, I didn’t plagiarize,” Jones said. However, the teaching assistant to whom he turned in his first assignment seemed to think the paper was not Jones’ own work.
“He didn’t think the thoughts I used were my own,” said Jones, who thought his paper was good but not brilliant.
However, in a large class, Jones said the teaching assistant and the professor did not know him. Also, Jones said his own shyness in class might have added to the confusion over the well-written paper.
The professor sent Jones an email asking to meet, and when they did meet, Jones said the teacher “was basically a dick about the whole situation.” The professor threatened Jones with judiciaries or a failing grade on the paper. Jones refused to take either because he emphatically denies any wrongdoing.
Jones said software like Turnitin.com probably would have saved him the stress of a plagiarism accusation. However, Jones was concerned about the copyright infringement accusations that Turnitin is facing.
Turnitin denies any wrongdoing on their part. The company claims to have consulted with several law firms, including Foley and Lardner, and according to Turnitin.com, it found that they are “100 percent in compliance with all relevant laws of all the countries in which we operate”.
This does not stop students from raising complaints and lawsuits against the company for copyright infringement. However, Turnitin is not concerned because according to Turnitin.com, students are “speaking from a viewpoint that is not supported by any current law”.
Whether the accusations against the plagiarism-prevention software will be proven correct is still a gray area, much like plagiarism itself. There seems to be no clear answers, but OU is working to find them.