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digital culture Plagiarism 101
Student plagiarism is epidemic in universities nationwide. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection program, hopes to deter cheaters.Student plagiarism is a growing concern at major universities, such as Purdue, Georgetown, Rutgers, Dartmouth, UCLA, with many faculty members turning to plagiarism detection program, Turnitin. In a 1999 survey conducted by Don McCabe, the founder of the Center for Academic Integrity (CAI), over 75 percent of American college students admitted cheating on tests or written assignments. In a 1998 study, Who’s Who Among American High School Students reported that 80 percent of college-bound students admitted to cheating on their schoolwork. Alarmingly the percentage of students actually caught cheating is a mere 5 percent, the study showed. Technology has made it easier for students to cheat. The Web affords easy access to information and makes the likelihood of getting caught much lower, due to the fact that professors are less likely to be able to locate the incriminating needle in the vastness of the Web's haystack. Instead of pouring over numerous books, and running the risk that the professor might be familiar with the pilfered passage, students merely have to scour the Web for a couple of hours in order to find relevant but not well-known sources. Then, too, if a student is really lazy, he or she can visit a paper-mill site, such as Cheathouse.com, and simply purchase a paper. John Barrie, the creator of Turnitin, and a former instructor at UC Berkeley, affirms the notion that the Internet is making the plague of plagiarism worse. “What you really have here are students using the Internet like a 4.5 billion-page cut-and-paste encyclopedia.” Yet, while he does believe the Internet has exacerbated the problem, he also believes the Internet will solve it, through programs such as Turnitin, which he invented in 1996.
According to the FAQ page on the company's website, Turnitin uses advanced algorithms to make a "digital fingerprint" of any submitted document and then compares the paper to three databases—the Internet, published works, and an archive of all papers ever submitted to Turnitin. The program then prints "originality reports," which highlight and color-code suspicious material within the submitted paper, providing links to the original source from which the material was plagiarized. The report is sent to the instructor’s Inbox within minutes if “Fast Track” analysis is requested. If the instructor chooses “24 hour turnaround,” a student can view the reports and correct his paper as many times as he wants within 24 hours. “A lot of people see things on the Internet as inherently different from [their real-world] counterparts,” says Barrie. The line between plagiarism and research, online, is not as sharply drawn, in the minds of many students, as it is drawn offline. Some students may hesitate at the idea of plagiarizing from a book but when it comes to the Internet, different rules apply, they believe. According to a CAI study published in 2001, 41 percent of students admitted to cutting-and-pasting sentences from the Internet and incorporating them into their papers without correct citation. Sixty-eight percent denied the gravity of Internet-based plagiarism. One example of this double standard, says Barrie, is the practice, widespread among college students, of downloading illegally copied music files. “Downloading music is seen as fair game but if [students] were to go to a record store, they would never steal a CD,” he points out. The 2001 CAI study also reported a 31 percent increase in students admitting to online cheating from 1999. However, notes Diane Waryold, executive director for the CAI, the increase in students cheating may actually reflect a greater awareness of the magnitude of student plagiarism with faculty members reporting more incidents because “it’s on the radar screen.” Waryold debates Barrie's claim that the cure for plagiarism-the Web-is also, in large part, its cause. Technology has created challenges in curbing plagiarism, she says, but “it doesn't necessarily mean that it [has] created more cheaters.” To curb cheating, she maintains, educators have to promote academic integrity, in the context of a univerisity community that values honesty. “Turnitin is not the answer,” she says. “It is a policing tool, a detection device that sets up an ‘us versus them’ mentality.” However, she says Turnitin would be effective if used as a prevention tool, enabling students to submit their papers to the system to see if they have incorrectly cited a source, which they could then change. Barrie declares emphatically that Turnitin is a plagiarism prevention system as opposed to a policing tool. He wants to make sure that “when [students] earn their grade, they earn an honest grade.” “One hundred percent of our clients buy Turnitin as a deterrent,” says Barrie. “None of them care to catch their students cheating.” In either case, Turnitin provides professors with documentation of plagiarism, improperly cited material, or mere coincidences. If a student’s paper contains more than eight consecutive words that match another source, the paper is flagged. The program receives over 20,000 papers daily and is used in over 50 countries in over 3,500 institutions including Georgetown University, Dartmouth University, UCLA, and UC Irvine, among others. Still, some universities are hesitant to subscribe to Turnitin because of legal concerns. The two most sensitive issues are students’ intellectual property and privacy rights. Professor Bartow Culp, a librarian
"Most students," he says, "do not realize that their works-these term papers/projects, even homework and e-mails-are their own intellectual property and are copyrighted materials immediately upon creation." Kathleen Peters, assistant dean of students at Purdue, says the university may consider subscribing to Turnitin in the future after “some resolution of the legal concerns that exist involving intellectual property and privacy rights.” For now, says Peters, “Much success in detecting plagiarism is found through a simple, free Google search.” According to Barrie, Turnitin does not in any way violate students' intellectual property rights. Not only has Turnitin’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, reviewed these concerns, he notes, but they have also been reviewed by clients' lawyers. “We wouldn’t have thousands and thousands of institutional clients if what we were doing was illegal,” he says. Student’s privacy rights are respected, Barrie claims. If a paper is found to be plagiarized, the faculty member gets a report identifying the original document, which is already in the system, by number, title, date and associated university. The name of the original author is withheld. Students may request that their papers be removed from Turnitin’s database, but the request must be submitted via the institution to Turnitin. Since the start of the program, Turnitin has received approximately 12 requests from students, says Barrie. However, he notes, none of these requests have been honored because the institutions in question have “not allowed it to happen.” Barrie acknowledges that since Turnitin is the first detection program of its kind, it's only natural for people to have doubts about its legality and effectiveness. “People don’t understand what we do or how it works,” he says. This includes Barrie’s former alma mater, UC Berkeley, where Barrie created Turnitin when he was a graduate student in 1996. Initially he created a peer review program for his students by posting papers on a website, so that his students could critique each others' works. However, it came to his attention that other students were copying these papers and submitting them as their own, which turned his attention to cheating. As a result, he created the program, Turnitin. Although many UC schools subscribe to Turnitin, Berkeley, ironically, does not. Although a number of instructors use the system, the univerisity itself is not a client. Barrie attributes Berkeley's official resistance to Turnitin to the negative media attention the school received in the wake of Barrie's comments about his experiences at Berkeley, dealing with plagiarizing students. "My observation was that cheating was rampant at Berkeley," he says. When Barrie was interviewed by reporters from CNN and the New York Times, he gave some examples from classes at Berkeley and as a result, the university got "dragged through the mud." So, says Barrie, "You tell me why Berkeley doesn't use Turnitin!" Related Links Teenagers turn to web for ghostwriters Glatt Plagiarism Program helps to deter plagiarism and encourage academic honesty High tech detection Georgetown University's definition of plagiarism Somebody call the Web plagiarism police Grace Lee is the media editor of ReadMe and an undergraduate journalism student at NYU. |
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