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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

To Plagiarize or Not to Plagiarize…

Although I would have liked to begin by responding to articles dealing with the grading system and eventually connecting the pressure to receive good grades to the increase in academic dishonesty, I realize I may not be able to directly link these things.  Instead, I found an article that discusses plagiarism as not only a problem for students, but also a problem for professionals. 

Richard A. Posner, author of “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” discusses how he himself has plagiarized in his position as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, “but he excuses the practice on the ground that everyone knows about it and therefore no one is harmed.”  Posner is also a law professor at the University of Chicago.  What kind of message is a man in a high power position sending to students by using the words of others in order to finish his own work? 

At the same time that he is letting judges off the hook, Mr. Posner acknowledges that in academic circles there is a double standard for plagiarism, with professors often getting off far more lightly than their students. The reason, he says, is that the left, which dominates the professoriate these days, is soft on plagiarism because the left is uncomfortable with ideas of individual creativity and ownership. (Surprisingly, he fails to take a whack at French theorists like Barthes and Foucault, who argued that in the strictest sense there is no such thing as an “author,” because all writing is collaborative and produced by a kind of cultural collective.)

This hypocrisy is intriguing because plagiarism has always been a question of ethics and honesty, but now, Posner gives me a new perspective on grading in which teachers that fear students thinking outside of the box are willing to accept plagiarism.  Many teachers are only interested in the one ‘true’ answer, which concerns me as a future teacher and as a part of society.  Within my mythology class my sophomore year of college, our professor assigned a pantheon project for the end of the semester.  The project required the students to create a group of gods/goddesses that represent what is important within present society and describe how these religious figures would look and act based on how each individual pictures those in power.  I looked forward to this project because it allowed me to open my mind and think deeply about what aspects of life are extremely important presently and how our society functions.  Others in the class could not understand the project and asked our professor every class time if certain ideas were right or wrong, but our professor kept explaining that the pantheon could not be wrong if the student could support the relevance in today’s society.  Needless to say, some projects were badly done because certain students concentrated too hard on if an idea was right or wrong rather than concentrating on the idea itself. 

In other cases I have experienced, certain professors do, in fact, look for one ‘right’ answer in papers.  I feel that this can be detrimental to the student’s learning abilities because the student focuses more on the exact answer the professor wants rather than pursuing different approaches.  This can lead to plagiarism in some cases if the student is unsure how to produce the ‘right’ answer.  Rather than brainstorming for a paper, the student will look up the idea that the professor has announced online and use the information of others as their own to please the professor and receive a good grade. 

Plagiarism, as Posner describes, has even become an issue for well-known writers, but they have not faced the same consequences that students encounter.  Posner even makes a point to say that sales for these writers have not suffered either.  The article concludes by saying:

No wonder young people are confused, and no wonder they continue to plagiarize in record numbers, with more than 40 percent of college students admitting to copying from the Internet in 2001. We talk to them about plagiarism in absolute terms, as if we were all agreed on what it was, and yet the literature suggests that once you’re out of school, it proves to be a crime like any other, with the punishment partly depending on whom you know and on how well you pull it off.

I find this contradiction extremely problematic because students should be learning about responsibility and maturity during their time at school.  If professionals are allowed to make unethical decisions and plagiarize, how are teachers supposed to enforce these issues?  The article even claims that,” The section of the University of Oregon handbook that deals with plagiarism, for example, was copied from the Stanford handbook.”  So how do professors handles these issues? Unfortunately, the article failed to make any suggestions, but I feel that teachers need to be very clear with students about academic honesty and also help students express their ideas without forcing them to conform to one perspective.  Then again, there is difficulty engaging the student to open his/her mind due to past experiences with teachers that searched for that one ‘true’ answer.  I’m very interested in hearing your ideas on the matter.

Plagiarism: Everybody Into the Pool

by Charles McGrath

January 7, 2007

Added: Just a little example of a major name caught plagiarizing…

To start…

Welcome to my blog.  As you may or may not be able to tell from my title, I am a “The Office” fan (which is a show I greatly recommend).  I am interested in discussing issues that arise when teaching language arts to high school students and hearing the opinions of others.  Although it is early in the semester, I believe my topic will focus on the grading system and how it affects a student’s amount of effort within a class.  Also, I am interested in plagiarism and the most effective way to overcome the problem without sending the wrong message to students.  I have the education feeds from The New York Times and MSNBC.  I choose these two because they have important information regarding education, but I am sure I will add more feeds as I search for more information on my topic. Overall, this blogging experience should be fun and I wanted to add a little clip from “The Office” for you to enjoy. 

                                            Matt