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After searching through the Google blogs that deal with TurnItIn.com, I was pleasantly surprised to see a blog written by the faculty of GVSU and thoughts about the new program.  I have already used the program for my American Literature class, but before our professor finalized the explanation for TurnItIn, he asked if the members in my class had any problems with participating.  Of course not, I’m not a cheater, was my initial thought but I noticed one girl stay behind and tell the professor she did have a problem with the program.  I was appalled.  If you don’t cheat, why should you have a problem with the program?  It’s just to make sure you’re not lifting someone else’s work and claiming it for yourself.  Aren’t you just singling yourself out as a possible plagiarizer?  My feeble mind could not comprehend the difficulty until finally I had an epiphany and realized my whole academic career I’ve had professors that refused to trust the work of students.  This did not cause me to rebel instantly, but I did consider the dilemma that teachers encounter.  The blog written by the professors from GVSU focus mostly on the negative aspects of the program. 

Because Turnitin compares student writing against a database of articles, previously submitted student writing, and web pages, it’s most easily used as a plagiarism detection service. Such use emphasizes the policing of student behavior and texts over good-faith assumptions about students’ integrity, and can shift attention away from teaching students how to avoid plagiarism in the first place.

Before my American Literature professor even discussed the use of TurnItIn for our papers, he went in to great detail about the citing process and it’s importance.  I feel like this is an important — and obvious — step of the education process.  If professors are more interested in catching a student cheating rather than taking the time to teach the correct way, students are at a major loss.  It is the responsibility of the professor to help students understand how the writing process works in order to be successful in his/her class and in the future. 

Also, as the faculty explain, the mistrust can be harmful to the student’s integrity.  Although I believe this can cause a certain amount of tension between the student and teacher, there is a definite problem with cheating.   Even if a teacher were to trust the students and explain the writing process thoroughly, some students will still cheat due to laziness, procrastination, or other reasons.  This creates a problem because any way a teacher addresses the problem, there will be a negative aspect of the solution.  For instance, if a teacher tries to compromise both extremes (checking all papers versus checking none for plagiarism) by subjecting random papers through the program, does that eliminate the complete mistrust of students and also keep students from cheating? 

The article goes on to describe the reliability of TurnItIn versus other online programs:

Experimentation by researchers and instructors has indicated that Turnitin can be ineffective in catching student plagiarism of Internet sources or can produce otherwise inaccurate results (e.g. Carbone, Royce). Teachers may have better luck using a mainstream search engine such as Google or Yahoo to find evidence of plagiarized text.

After reading this article, I found another article linked to this blog that discusses a student that is suing the University of Tampa and her professor for slander when accusing her of plagiarism.  Although this was a short article, I found one sentence very interesting,  “The university submitted the paper to turnitin.com, an online site that checks for plagiarism, but the results came back negative, according to the lawsuit”(Emerson).  If the program is unreliable, professors should not bother using it to check for plagiarized papers.  If the program is being used to scare students into academic honesty, the fear will only last so long before students find a way around being caught.  What kind of solutions can you think of that create positive teacher-student relationships without allowing students to take advantage of online resources dishonestly?

Issues Raised by Use of Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Software

by Charlie Lowe, Ellen Schendel, and Julie White

September 7, 2006

UT Student Sues School, Says It Slandered Her

by Adam Emerson

November 1, 2006