Call me navel-gazing, but I love it when the NY Times’ Ethicist gets queries on academic quandaries. A reader writes:
When my daughter and her fellow college students handed in term papers, their professor had them submit their work to Turnitin.com, a Web site that detects plagiarism, something he had never done before. This has a whiff of entrapment. Shouldn’t the prof have announced in advance that this would be required, giving the class a chance to clean up its work? NAME WITHHELD, PHOENIX
The Ethicist’s reply:
I’m astonished you believe a professor should help cheaters “clean up” — more accurately, “cover up” — their deceit. It should be needless to say that students ought not cheat in any case. If the professor provided a distant early warning each time he intended to actually confirm students’ honesty, he would in effect encourage them to cheat whenever he did not issue such a warning. He might as well send out an Evite: Feel free to plagiarize this week; I won’t be checking.
I’m tempted to follow this professor’s example, but my experience with cheaters (at Harvard) was exceptionally disappointing: after two of my students were found with identical blue books with potential exam answers (presumably they smuggled them in) the university response was so lax as to (deliberately?) prevent any real discipline.
One of those people is now a relatively prominent politician. I think I’d rather just not know…
Update: Turns out that, along with Harvard and Princeton professors, I’m not even allowed to use TurnItIn. Now that smells a little funny.
6 Responses
I use turnitin in most of my UG classes in Ireland, and it works a treat. Intellectual property or not, it functions both as a deterrent and as a check on cheating, but also provides a lot of feedback on referencing, so when students don’t attribute sources well, it gives them lots of feedback on that. Very good system, I’d recommend it.
Wow. What I wouldn’t give for Turnitin access.
I’m thinking of being really devious with my students this year by announcing that we know students have cheated and they have X days to turn themselves in or they’ll fail – with no evidence that something happened. I’ve heard this results in kids turning themselves in without my TA actually having to catch them. Think that would get past the Ethicist? Or my conscience?
I don’t remember exactly how it works, but Simon is on to something. I am pretty sure that every paper checked by Turnitin becomes part of Turnitin’s database to catch new cheaters. This means that schools that use Turnitin are forcing students to give their work to a 3rd party (for profit) service, and that each paper added benefits turnitin (by improving the database) but the students don’t get anything back.
I wonder what would happen if parts of a paper cited a something under a creative commons non-commercial license, or if a student put that on their work. That should bar entry to the database, but still allow for marking. The issue is more complex than schools just turning a blind eye to cheating.
I am a Princeton undergrad and although I am sure there is some cheating/intellectual dishonesty, the school takes really harsh measures. People have been suspended due to a footnote left out by accident.
(I am not the other Simon who commented above).
As someone who spent time TAing and therefore having to detect copying, plagiarising, and other forms of cheating I would have loved my university to adopt something like Turnitin. It would have save me vast amounts of time when marking.
It also looks like the people at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale haven’t read any of Dan Ariely’s work, which is odd. Maybe they’re simply in denial about the fact that their students actually cheat.
There was a brief Turnitin “controversy” when I was an undergrad at McGill. I think it had something to do with students having to relinquish intellectual property rights.