Each year, Stuyvesant students write dozens of papers and essays. For everything we write, there is one ironclad rule: don’t plagiarize. Every teacher tells us this. They warn us of the consequences: a call home, suspension, or even a permanent black mark on our academic record. Some teachers make us sign papers pledging that our work is original, trusting that we’ll honor our commitments. Other teachers use Turnitin.com, an online plagiarism-checker that compares submissions with Internet content. Turnitin is popular because it is a seemingly sure-fire way to catch cheaters. However, there’s a price to pay: Turnitin’s legality is highly questionable and it creates an atmosphere of distrust between students and teachers.
Anything you write for school is automatically copyrighted; you do not need to apply for one. When you submit your work to Turnitin, Turnitin saves a copy to its database to compare against future submissions in order to stop students from plagiarizing other students’ work. Since you don’t know that Turnitin is saving a copy of your paper, and it doesn’t ask for or acquire your consent, its a potential violation of your rights.
Saving a copy of your paper is copyright infringement because Turnitin is using your paper for its own economic gain without compensating you. The copyright laws state that portions of original work may be quoted, but only if allowed by the author or for “fair use” (discussions). By making a hefty profit through subscriptions to its expensive service (which can cost thousands of dollars a year), Turnitin uses your work in a way that was not originally intended. What makes Turnitin so “effective”—the reason it is preferred over all other such sites—is that it checks students’ papers against each other. But this means that its profit is coming directly from students’ work.
Turnitin argues that its enterprise is “fair use.” However, it goes no further than to say, “When students claim that Turnitin violates the law or engages in ‘commercial exploitation’ of their copyrights, that claim is simply not based on fact.” This oversimplified response fails to answer the charges against it, and is probably the reason there are already multiple lawsuits filed against Turnitin.
Putting aside the legal issues, when teachers use Turnitin, they send their students the message “We don’t trust you.” While Turnitin claims its so-called “Originality Reports” (the results it gives to the teacher) do not provide a clear-cut “guilty” or “innocent,” having to use Turnitin at all is an accusation. Its verdicts are of questionable reliability, as it does not check offline (printed) books. It also hurts students who incorporate direct quotes into their papers since it has no capacity to recognize citations. At the end of its check, Turnitin returns the results as a percent plagiarized—just a number. If a teacher just looks at the percent and does not examine where it came from (Turnitin marks each section), students who used direct quotes appear to have cheated. Some students might stop using direct quotes, sacrificing quality in their papers. Using Turnitin doesn’t teach students that plagiarism is wrong. It just encourages cheaters to find another way to beat the system.
While there is no perfect solution to the issue of plagiarism, Turnitin is far from perfect. Other sites, such as plagiarismchecker.com, use Google searches, and while not as effective, they are free and don’t save copies of students’ papers. Instead, teachers should impress upon students the importance of honesty and the consequences of plagiarism. One of my teachers always tells her classes: better to fail one test or two tests or even all my tests than risk getting caught cheating once. If you fail, I’ll help you. If you cheat, I’ll throw you out of my class. Instead of trying to catch students after they plagiarize, teachers should stop plagiarism before it starts.
Despite the wide usage of Turnitin.com, Princeton University rejects Turnitin and all other plagiarism checkers. It still abides by an honor code, in which it addresses the copyright issue, “The right to intellectual ownership of original academic work is as important to the life of the university as the right to own personal possessions.” If a respected Ivy League school can trust its students to do what’s right and not plagiarize, we should follow their example and do the same.
*This article was not plagiarized.
Very funny, Gavin.
One of the uses covered under Fair Use is “criticism.”
I think you could argue that attempting to determine if something is plagiarized or not counts as criticism.
And do news outlets lose fair-use protection if they are operated for profit? Do parodies have to be given away for free to be protected?
My students asked me if they could have access to turnitin, not the other way round. If you use it as a way for them to check their own work it is a very powerful learning tool. People misuse it as a stick and that is where the problem is. It’s great to allow students to upload drafts multiple times and see how much of their assignment is cited source material compared with analysis or critique.
I agree!
I think that this should be used as an option for students who wish to use it in order to learn. Colleges who mandate it’s use put themselves at risk for civil lawsuit as students give consent when they sign into the program letting turnitin off the hook. In order to pass courses I needed to allow the use of my work to be used in this way as the college mandated it. I also was enrolled a program at a college with too many credits to drop after this policy was implemented. I had no choices. Harvard and Yale are not using this as they use a merit system that does not assume all are guilty. I personally have never had a problem in using it – all of my papers below 2% when checked. I do have a problem with being forced to use it as I believe that does violate my rights.
University of Phoenix requires the use of all papers submitted, however my ex-wife is under investigation because of accused plagiarism. She ran her original paper through and it gave her a percentage of 14%. When the teacher ran it, he said it was 49%. Of course that is with the quoted text included. UofP users beware!
I am a student at the UOP as well and my papers are original and everything cited. I was recentaly accused of plagiarism as well. I know I did nothing wrong and every paper you submit through the checker through the UOP saves your paper which is a violation because the programs doesn’t ask for your consent.
I am also currently a student at University of Phoenix and I have had a teacher falsely accuse me of plagiarizing two assignments, one being my final assignment worth 25% of my final grade. I have asked the teacher to show me the proof of the plagiarism, but has repeatedly ignored my requests. The teacher also first said I had copied my papers “verbatim” (word for word) and then quickly changed his story to that my papers are “kind of similar” to other papers. I am considering hiring a lawyer if Academic Affairs does not reverse these decisions soon.
I am currently a student in college who is in my last class before I receive my MHA, and my teacher graded my papers gave me all the point for one assignment and took out ten point from the other assignment and said at first I had too many sources and not enough of my own words, last night I receive a email tell me that turnitin rank me as a high mark plagarism and he must notify the school about this, and I email him back and said I had careful did all my assignments right, have a A average, now in the last units of my graduating and this. I am going to fight to the end on this.
[...] I found an article titled, “The Truth About Turn It In,” written by Emma Ziegellaub Eichler for her high school paper in April 2008. Eichler claims, [...]
Turnitin does not violate copyright laws due to you giving them legal permission to use yor work in this way. You do this when you apply for and use your account. Prior to using your account you sign a u release allowing them to store and use your work to check that of others. When you do this you give up your legal rights. It is actually the college that is violating your rights in making it manditory to use turnitin in order to pass your courses and get credit for your papers. This is how they continue to use your work for free…no one has ever brought suit against the colleges who mandate turnitin and they are the ones you would need to file a civil law suit against.
If I email an assignment to my teacher and he or she submits it to TurnItIn.com using their account, how did I give them permission?
You can’t blame the teachers who submit the papers because they are using the service as intended, which makes TurnItIn.com liable for their intellectual theft (funny, that’s the same thing they try to combat, afterall plagiarism is intellectual theft).
Reply to
“Turnitin does not violate copyright laws due to you giving them legal permission to use yor work in this way…
…When you do this you give up your legal rights.”
Very true! I STOPPED using ANY quotes at all for my next assignment!
Quoting articles is legal… Hello, fair use!
Has anyone noticed that there is a conflict of interest here? This website profits from being used as a tool for hunting students down. I’m from a 4-year institution, and my non-western cultures professor ran my final paper through the site and said that I plagiarized 19% of it. When I saw the report, it had highlighted a properly cited quote that listed the original speaker and where to find it, the words “the”, “as”, “of” and “at”, and said that I somehow stole the idea of Islamic marriage ceremonies. Shouldn’t professors know how to cite and be checking for proper citations themselves instead of running it through, basically, a virtual witch hunt? Because of this teacher’s ignorance and laziness, the provost office practically crucified me even when I presented evidence that I had cited everything correctly. If a professor doubts the authenticity of an idea, shouldn’t they try and research it themselves?? I mean, if I’m paying $4,000 dollars a semester for a degree, then I want the instructor to actually be doing their best at evaluating things themselves and not relying on a third party source that seeks to make a profit off of paranoia. Even the English professors and ivy league schools don’t use turnitin! Doesn’t that say something? This whole thing wreaks of corruption and is outrageously indicative of a deteriorating education system. It’s an absolute disgrace.
Well said
This has turned out to be a farce.I was totally taken aback by the naivety of some tutors in some UK universities. They would promote the students to use their own words, and at the same time,would pull them up for citing no references. One University had to include, the references and bibliography for their turnitin report. So it means, any Harvard referenced text book, would add up to your similarity. The higher the number of your references, the higher the plagiarism. What a joke
I agree. From where I go to school, each year I must pay a fee during registration. Part of that fee goes towards things such as TurnItIn memberships. TurnItIn could be detecting plagiarism by matching documents word for word, which is not effective especially when one student changes a few sentences around and reorders paragraphs. We should train teachers to recognize each student’s writing style and determine what they are capable of rather than letting a machine do all the work.
I hate turnitin. At my college, we are subjected to it without choice because we use blackboard which for courses that are integrated with classroom time and online time assignments that we have to submit are mandated to be submitted through turnitin which was already have accounts for through our blackboard submission.
Topics discussed in my major, being that I’m a Political science major, tend to overlap not just in discussion but in our assignments. I’ve had the same paper assigned twice by the same professor in two different classes but had to write to separate papers because they were being submitted via turnitin, however, even though I was the originator of the paper the first time he said that it would be plagiarism if I submitted the same paper to him twice, even thought the second submission would be an updated/more current version of the paper.
Turnitin although a good idea at heart makes it easier on the professors to be able to take on my classes and makes it harder on the students because we are more fearful of ‘plagiarism’ and creating more stress and burden on creating an ‘original’ assignment.
I never heard of turnitin until I took a religion class and had to do a research paper. I gotta say that Turnitin picks out certain words from my paper and then put a grade that I plagiried like my whole paper. Most of my work came out of books not websites. Even the websites they used I never been there before. I think Turnitin is a piece of crap and if they really want students not plagarise they should at least make sure they have the same sites, books or etc.
The problem is
1) They stored work is used to determine if OTHER students are cheating, not criticism
2) Fair Use does not cover using someone else’s work for economic gain (profit) – TurnItIn.com TRIPLED their price from $100/teacher/year to $300/teacher/year
If they only compared the work against other papers at that school or if the storage of submitted papers was optional, it wouldn’t be so bad…
I am an English professor. The idea that professors may not be showing proof of plagiarism to students is disturbing. The truth is, Turnitin.com shows each instance of plagiarism- it highlights the text (and only the text that is plagiarized) and numbers each instance, cross referencing it with the original source. It is easy to show a student what the issues are, and a professor should show a student proof if asked!
There is also an option to exclude quotes and the bibliography, so that the report doesn’t give an inaccurate percentage (not that it is hard to look for quotations without that feature).
If a student or professor turns the paper in twice, it will show that the student “plagiarized” his or her own paper. If it is a paper for a different class, this is still academic dishonesty. Students are never allowed to turn in the same paper for two classes without permission of both professors or it is actually considered a form of plagiarism.
I think it is an overstatement to say this is a witch hunt in most cases. I use Turnitin when someone suddenly doesn’t sound like him or herself. I find no pleasure in finding that students have plagiarized. I teach them how to avoid it and tell them the consequences the first week of school. However, if a student is not doing his or her own work, it defeats the purpose of the class. Also, I would rather that student get caught now rather than pull something like this in his or her career with more dire consequences. It also shows a lack of integrity that a student may blow off unless called on it. I am not talking about mistakes on the student’s part, however. I am talking about intentional cheating.
It does seem that a few on this page are assuming some things about professors or the program without any backing. You may want to cite your proof in these cases. ;) While many of the concerns here are valid, it can confuse people when some are just mad they got caught, so they make up accusations that have no basis to validate their anger.
Originality check: 90% similar
I think most teachers can tell on their own whether or not work was plagiarized. If a poor student submits work clearly above their level, investigate. And any competent teacher should be able to tell if students are copying each other. I don’t see the trust issue as being important–don’t lectures on academic honesty also raise trust issues?–but I don’t think good teachers should need turnitin at all, and Lord knows schools need all the money they’ve got. I say cut it.
I guess I’m gonna need to do some more research but this is a good place to start.