Research, Recycle
A piece in today’s Globe Technology section got me thinking again about plagiarism. Seems Mount Saint Vincent has ruled against the use of a US product called Turnitin, an anti-plagiarism device. Mount Saint Vincent appears to be worried about privacy and morale, if Turnitin is used.
I know a little bit about how it works, because York University, my erstwhile employer, licenses Turnitin and a number of profs there use it. The company maintains a database of all submitted student papers; and professors typically require students to submit their essays via Turnitin. A submitted essay is checked against all other essays in the database and against some portion of the internet, to ensure that there is no significant copying from unacknowledged sources.
What I can’t say is how much plagiarism Turnitin detects, or, more likely, deters. I do know, however, that plagiarism exists — in law school as well. (One is tempted to say “even in law school” but given the high pressure environment and the fact that law students are very like ordinary human beings, it would be a miracle if there were no cheating.)
What would make more sense than Turnitin, so far as law schools are concerned, would be an in-house database of all student essays, because it’s far more likely that Student A submits to Prof X an essay originally written by Student B for Prof Y than that the student purchases an essay from outside sources. It would also, incidentally, provide the law school with an interesting repository of research, which, though not of the first water, might nonetheless be of some legitimate use to others later on.
Such a database, if made available to others, might even encourage students to work that little bit harder, knowing that their work was to be, in effect, published. What’s really needed for students to work up to their true level, however, is that professors require from them as a matter of course outlines and rough drafts of essays, something that is rare in legal academe. Harder to cheat, this way. Harder work for the prof, too, but… that’s a different matter.
Well I went to my source of wisdom, a daughter who faced Turnitin at Dalhousie, who said that the programme is only spottily effective, but had a minatory, general deterrent effect on some of the weaker students.
Others were intrigued and wondered how they could game the system. They discovered that Turnitin tends to use as comparators those knowledge sources that float up to the top rank in any search. Just like most members of the public who apparently stop looking after the first 2 or 3 top entries on a Google results list. Going much deeper down the list tended to uncover sources that were unknown to Turnitin. There seems to be underground learning out there.
On Simon F’s specific idea that essays tend to be cribbed from others in a faculty rather than more broadly, I was told of one Dalhousie prof who sniffed collusion between a group of friends, and then ran all the essays through Turnitin to see whether that could be substantiated. And they all came back assessed as sparklingly original.
By the way, my source for all this is keenly aware of academic ethics, and makes these comments to me as a simple observer.
Has anyone here tried running a paper you’ve written yourself and KNOW isn’t plagiarized through to see the results? They were discussing Turnitin on today’s morning news, and mentioned that it looks for patterns of words in groups of eight. For those of us whose writing is ripe with cliches, we could be in a world of trouble with this product.
I would also attest to the spotty performance of Turnitin at Dal. And noted with great intersest when the MSVU’s decisions made the front page of the local daily this week. A couple of more issues with Turnitin.
-Turnitin, keeps a copy of every paper submitted and then uses that in the comparator group for future submissions. So in effect, they are making money off of the work of students whose papers are submitted to Turnitin without their consent.
– Ask a few profs. if they are willing to submit their papers to Turnitin, and you are likely to hear something about copyright, academic freedom or something of that nature. So hopefully they would think twice about submitting student papers.
– If you write more than one paper on a similar topic, you will likely find that Turnitin cites you for plagiarizing yourself.
It is a lazy tool with questionable credentials. As Simon F. stated outlines, drafts and hard work are far more effective means of preventing plagiarism. And I would dare say that they are also more popular than Turnitin at Dal Law.