Issue 1, Volume 8
(Mis)Trusting Technology that Polices Integrity: A Critical Assessment of Turnitin.com
Michael Donnelly, Rebecca Ingalls, Tracy Ann Morse, Joanna Castner, and Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler
Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
by Michael Donnelly
Never trust anything that can think for itself
if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
Mr .Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
J.K. Rowling, 1999
Some years ago, as a young graduate student, I spent a semester as a graduate assistant in the computer lab. In reviewing the then current scholarship on computers in composition, I was dismayed to find that the use of computers hadn't really developed much beyond doing the same things we'd been doing with pen and paper (e.g., journal writing), except now, we could do them on a computer. Upon remarking on this to the director of the lab, he said something like, "Yes. It's as if they've invented the airplane and are driving it around on the ground."
Of course, we couldn't then foresee the explosion of technological development coming in the next decade-or even within the next couple of years. E-mail, the internet, cell phones and text messaging-these things, as it turns out, are not merely new technological tools; they have fundamentally altered the ways in which people read and write, or, to put it another way, they ways in which they compose.
Thus, for teachers of composition, it has become increasingly important to understand, whether we choose to incorporate technology into our courses or not, the impact(s) of such technology. For many, it has meant using technology inside and outside of the classroom, in various ways, in order to "reach" students in ways that traditional pedagogies often do not.
Flying, Finally
Even so, while this means, perhaps, that we're not driving airplanes around on the ground anymore, much of the same attitude seems to encourage using technology simply for the sake of using technology. Because the culture at large seems to proceed on the assumption that "technology" (as we understand it) is always "good" (that is, that is signifies "progress"), our institutions often proceed on the same assumption. Thus, faced with a problem like, say, plagiarism, the institution is inclined to look to technology for a solution. Indeed, our university now subscribes to Turnitin.
New technologies seem to have brought with them a new wave of academic dishonesty; whether this is truly an increase in the amount of plagiarism is unclear, and probably unverifiable. What does seem clear is that plagiarism has taken on new forms (e.g., cutting-and-pasting from Internet sites; papers purchased online), and that while those forms are easier, in many ways, for students to engage in, they are also easier for faculty to track down.
I recall some years ago, as a graduate assistant, browsing the stacks in the library, actually leafing through books on a major U.S. author to find the essay (essays, as it turned out) from which a student had copied her paper. Now, my first recourse is Google; better yet, have the students themselves download their own papers into a policing database.
The Role of the WPA
As an instructor, I have until recently been able to resist the alluring pull of Plagiarism Detection Software (PDS) such as Turnitin.com. As a writing program administrator, I have often counseled others, usually part-time instructors and/or graduate students, on dealing with specific cases of plagiarism. Most often, this has meant dealing with plagiarism post facto. Less frequently, I've talked with instructors about "prevention," which, in general, means "make the policy clear on your syllabus," and even less helpfully: "give good writing assignments."
I have never once recommended the use of Turnitin or any other such software. Nor have I necessarily been very emphatic in my objections to it. At best, I might say something like, "I have serious reservations about the ethics involved in using it." Yet I have used Turnitin recently, in a limited fashion-which is, I daresay, perhaps less ambiguously unethical. What has made it easier, though not easy, to temporarily suspend my reservations, is the institutionalization of Turnitin. Indeed, the fact that Turnitin is now an institutional presence on my campus has forced the issue.
As the Director of First-Year Writing, I can't simply ignore it. I must, instead, to confront it. It would be easier, no doubt, to follow the university's lead, which is to say, to simply make faculty aware of the availability of Turnitin: "Use it or don't, it doesn't matter." But it seems to me that the very serious ethical and pedagogical issues raised mean that it does matter.
The issue of plagiarism is one with which good teachers, teachers of conscience and of care, must struggle. It is not, as often seems to be assumed across the university, a simple matter of catching dishonorable students and prosecuting them. We have to ask questions about why students plagiarize, make distinctions between kinds and degrees of plagiarism, and, ultimately, endeavor to teach more effectively.
Let's be clear about this point: much of the tension arising from plagiarism and the use of Turnitin is based in the fact that we hate to receive plagiarized essays. And I don't believe hate is too strong a word here. We hate it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it seems to signal some kind of failure on our part. In some cases, perhaps many though certainly not all, I believe this to be more or less true.
The student has not been prepared or equipped to deal with the assignment I've given, did not have the needed resources available, and did not feel that I could provide those resources. It is also partly true, at least, that the student has to some degree now robbed me of the opportunity to provide those resources, to teach, and for that I am now resentful. The student has, in effect, told me I am inadequate as an instructor, and has further insulted my intelligence by trying to pull one over on me. Thus it's easier to simply lay down evidence and pass judgment than to engage in deep conversation with students about their work, their motivations-indeed, their fears.
The Problems with PDS
The impact of technologies makes these issues more complicated and therefore murkier, not clearer or simpler; they are therefore more pressing, not less. The institutionalization of such technologies, as on our campus, adds layers of complexity to those issues. Generally, the issues seem to me to fall into two categories: pedagogical and ethical.
The first asks what is taught (and/or not taught) through the use of PDS? Does it truly deter plagiarism? Does it make it easier for instructors to identify plagiarized papers? Does it make it too easy for instructors to deal with plagiarism without asking the hard questions about why students plagiarize and what we should do about it? Related to this is the problem that PDS tends to presume student guilt, breeding (or perhaps merely reflecting) a culture of suspicion and blame, and intensifying the divide between faculty and students; this is, of course, counter-productive in an educational context.
The second type of issue, the ethical, refers primarily to the intellectual property rights of students. PDS doesn't merely infringe on those rights, it simply ignores them. If the purpose of such software is to "protect" or "improve" or "increase" Academic Integrity, then we must ask difficult questions about the integrity of the software itself, of the ethics involved in simply appropriating the labor of students in order to sell a product. (For it is in fact a product-created, marketed, and purchased. Let's not forgot that.) This is even more pressing when faculty at colleges and universities across the country, including our own institution, are lobbying for better, clearer protection of their own Intellectual Property Rights.
Another of the major problems with institutionalizing Turnitin is that it tends to presume guilt, breeding a culture of suspicion and intensifying the divide between faculty and students. The main "purpose" of Turnitin, we are told, is that it "Deters plagiarism before it happens" (Wertz and Matulich 2004). Yet this seems to me misleading. First, it's similar in its approach to the "War on Drugs"-we'll prevent drug use by increased police presence in targeted areas, stiffer penalties for offenders, and more and more drug testing. Certainly there's lip service paid to "education," but the money goes to fund law enforcement and penalize drug users. And we've seen how successful that approach has been, which is to say, it hasn't.
Second, Turnitin searches only, in addition to "[m]illions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin since 1996," "[a] current and archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet (more than 4.5 billion pages indexed)" and "[m]illions of published works from ProQuest databases and The Gutenburg Collection of literary classics" (Wertz and Matulich 2004). This means, then, that Turnitin may deter certain forms of plagiarism - it does not search millions of student papers never turned in, or millions of other published works, including books and articles not available on the Internet. Nor would it necessarily deter students from having a peer or family member write a paper for them. It may instead merely encourage students to resort to more traditional forms of plagiarism, i.e., to do a better job of plagiarizing.
May the Conversation Continue...
Despite these problems, however, we continue to grapple with the presence and the possibilities of Turnitin. We are in some sense forced to do this, since Turnitin has become an institutional presence, one that cannot simply be ignored or dismissed. While faculty are by no means required to use it, its mere presence and accessibility give it some currency in the intellectual marketplace, and we should wonder what it might mean if students are subjected to it randomly-what happens when a student who was not exposed to Turnitin in first-year writing suddenly finds herself "caught" by it in an upper-level writing intensive course?
Likewise, the possibility(s) PDS may offer as a teaching tool are worth exploring. Thus, in the remainder of this article, my colleagues take up the various tensions, identify some of the threads that so far entangle and threaten to ensnare us. In the next section, Anne continues the discussion of "ethical, philosophical, and pedagogical" concerns, arguing that the use of Turnitin is actually counter-productive, inasmuch as it reinforces the historical divide between teachers and students, undermines notions of ethos central to rhetoric, and contradicts notions of process central to contemporary composition instruction. Rebecca then problematizes the issue of student "consent" by examining the intersection(s) of pre-constructed student identities (as "cheaters"), legal issues, and the definition of (student) "work." Any use of PDS must, she suggests, include not simply education about plagiarism, but information and discussion of the complex issues surrounding Intellectual Property Rights.
Joanna further explores the issue of student identity(s) by using Rebecca Moore Howard's notion of "patchwriting" to problematize our assumptions about academic writing and, therefore, plagiarism. In so doing, Joanna is able to explicate the relationship between students and writing-to demonstrate that an alternative approach to plagiarism itself can turn it into a way students can begin, usefully, to (re)construct their own identities as writers by exploring their own ideas about "skill and creativity" in writing. Tracy then discusses ways in which Turnitin may be useful pedagogically-not as a plagiarism-detection device, nor simply to teach about plagiarism, but to actually teach students about revision by helping them to see their own writing through a different lens. May the conversation continue.
Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
by Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler
In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (2005), grad. student "Michael Thompson" (a pseudonym) confesses to having plagiarized a portion of his dissertation as he makes the case that plagiarism is common, easy, and rampant in academia today (p. B5). This belief is upheld at the university where we (the authors) are employed as evidenced by its programmatic adoption of the anti-plagiarism software from Turnitin. A 2000 Gallup poll cited during the presentation that introduced faculty to the software notes that Americans believe that "the top two problems facing the country today are education and a decline in ethics" (Wertz and Matulich 2004).
In fact, this loss of ethics in academia may be the cause of the rise in plagiarism. Turnitin would be, it seemed, our faculty's panacea to this national loss of ethics as reflected in our student population. After my own trial of Turnitin's Plagiarism Prevention software, however, I have come to believe that internet software as a policing agent is in no way an effective means to instill academic ethics, and may well undermine our effort to do so. My concerns are with the rhetorical messages sent both by the administration and by me in the subscription and use of this software product.
In the fall of 2005 I decided to require that my students use Turnitin.com. Having always relied on the process-oriented nature of composition pedagogy to prevent and catch plagiarists, I wanted to find out what effect, if any, using Turnitin would have on the ethical, philosophical, and pedagogical composition of my classroom. Turnitin's home page lauds its products as "recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention" and claims to "promote originality in student work, improve student writing and research skills, encourage collaborative learning, and save valuable instructor time" (Turnitin.com).
The administration, however, for reasons which I am unaware, chose only to subscribe to the Plagiarism Prevention software and eschewed the complementary products such as the Peer Review system. By opting to subscribe only to the policing product offered at the Turnitin.com website, I am concerned that the administration sent a number of undesirable (and perhaps unintentional) messages to the faculty, the most important of which may be that they placed a higher value on catching and punishing students who plagiarized than they did any other technological advances offered by this company.
This message placed all the focus on the students' end-products. This focus is antithetical to the university's own stated philosophical emphasis on process-centered writing as a means of intellectual growth; thus it seems that, as users of this software, we are guilty of talking out of both sides of our mouths (1).
The Devaluing of Growth?
A keystone of composition pedagogy is the intellectual process of writing; in rhetoric, ethos is instrumental. These two concepts form the foundation of many a composition classroom and of liberal education itself, a philosophy which the University of Tampa holds dear. In my first semester of using Turnitin.com, I found myself guilty of dissimulation: while professing the virtues of process writing, and emphasizing the necessity that all good rhetors should have a strong ethos, or believable character, I was simultaneously demonstrating my mistrust in them and my emphasis on the end-product of their work by insisting that they filter their final drafts through the policing agents in the Turnitin software.
While I exhorted students to be ethical scholars, to seek knowledge for the sake of itself, I reminded them that, ultimately, their work is a marketable object to be offered in exchange for a grade. I intimated that I trusted neither their integrity nor my own ability to discern the authenticity of their work, despite having read drafts, journals, and reader responses.
In my experience, the anti-plagiarism software certainly did catch some plagiarism (both intentional and unintentional) among students. However, I cannot believe the product in and of itself promotes originality in student work. In fact, as evidenced by the attempts by hackers to disable the website, I am more inclined to believe that it instead encourages students to find ways around it. The problem is not the plagiarizing. It's the mentality among the students that creates the willingness to risk detection, and antiplagiarism software, used alone, simply reinforces the us vs. them/ivory tower v. real world mentality that students use as an excuse to cheat in the first place. Students who devalue the process of learning and intellectual growth are, I believe, more willing to compromise their own academic integrity.
A Lack of Ethics
Higher education is increasingly seen as a commodity, an insurance policy of sorts. Students attend college not to gain intellectual enlightenment, but to ensure their future material success. As David Callahan notes in The Cheating Culture, the competition for material wealth is fierce and models of ethica l- and financially successful - citizens are scarce (2004). A. J. Sherman speaks of "the larger society with its yawning chasm between winners and losers" (p. 88) and the resultant erosion of:
our notions of an academic community . . . a place in which faculty and students are animated by the same search for knowledge, bound together by commonly accepted rules, obligations, and even a shared understanding about appropriate forms of discourse and standards of evidence and reasoned argument (p. 89).
Students will therefore take risks to outperform their peers when they believe their futures in the "real world" are at stake, especially in classes like first-year writing, which students routinely see as without value in the long term. The consequences of detection are outweighed by the risks since the course neither counts toward the major nor will the professor be likely to be writing any recommendations in the future, especially if that professor is a part-timer or teaching a first-year course outside the student's major.
But when we rely on products such as Turnitin's plagiarism prevention software, we run the risk of perpetuating the commoditization of education and we draw attention away from the ideals of integrity, ethics, and knowledge for the sake of themselves.
And herein lies the dilemma: while I acknowledge that plagiarism is rampant, I reject the use of plagiarism-detection software for that purpose alone; and yet I must also acknowledge that, based on the statistics (see Tracy Ann Morse's section below), I have surely encountered, and passed, plagiarized work unknowingly. However, I fear that all too often educational technology markets itself as a cure-all for what ails the busy instructor - and increasingly, that instructor may well be an itinerant adjunct with several employers and no real support other than meager stipends. Thus, the allure of such time-saving software is clear and the pressure to adhere to institutional policy is heavy (while the opportunity to instill or negotiate that policy does not exist). Just as students must learn that the word processor can't fix our spelling or our grammar, university administrators must understand that the computer cannot think for the professor.
Instead of seeking quick high-tech solutions to increasing demands on our time, we should consider the Gallup poll's revelation that Americans see that the biggest problems facing us today are education and a lack of ethics. Perhaps if we put those two together we will see that we have the answer. We must not view higher education as a meal ticket to a corporate corner office. We must not perpetuate the notion that college is a necessary "hoop" students must jump through to gain access to the more lucrative professions. In fact, we must try to destabilize as much as possible the consumerist part of our culture that greedily pushes aside integrity in exchange for material acquisition.
An Ethos of Academic Integrity
Sherman argues that "academic integrity cannot be coerced, nor can it be taught except by example and the rigorous inculcation of a code of honor that is then internalized" (p. 91). The fact is that students today (even, as "Thompson" shows us, the most advanced doctoral candidates) don't necessarily have adequate models of integrity. The news is rife with accounts of misconduct at the highest levels:
These examples and the very existence, much less institutional adoption of, plagiarism prevention software communicates an open acknowledgement of rampant plagiarism and an assumption of guilt.
Americans acknowledge that we live in a time of decreased integrity. As a humanist, I believe that the solution must extend beyond the catch-and-punish phase. If I continue to use plagiarism prevention software, I will do so as a part of a comprehensive pedagogical approach to academic integrity. We must prevent the behavior from the start, not by requiring students to run their work through the intellectual equivalent of a metal detector; we must instill, foster, and inspire an ethos of academic integrity. We must call to account, even if only as classroom examples, these examples of misconduct we see in the larger society.
Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
by Rebecca Ingalls
The fragmented array of emotions (guilt, anger, resentment, hurt, vengefulness, relief, violation) that have arisen from our (the authors) informal discussions of students' plagiaristic acts and the ethics of policing them by using Turnitin.com are a testament to the human complexities of trying to engage honest, rigorous pedagogy in an easy-access technological world where students are perhaps more tempted than ever to engage their own work by way of less-than-honest, less-than-rigorous means. This treacherous ether of cyberspace, in many ways, has reconstructed our perceptions of students before they settle into their chairs and pick up their pens on the first day of class.
But, as Matthew Willen, in his article "Reflections on the Cultural Climate of Plagiarism" (2004), suggests, "plagiarism is certainly not a new phenomenon," despite its increasing visibility, thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web (p. 55). Rather, argues Willen, students often resort to cheating because they are struggling to "compet[e] for opportunities for the success myth that are more limited than they were at other times in the past" and therefore succumb to the anxiety involved by stealing their work in order to earn the necessary "results" (p. 56). In other words, students are vying for spots in their learning and working lives that encourage them to attend more to "product" than to the integrity of the "process" (p. 57).
Willen argues for a solution-approach that takes into account multiple factors: "value of learning," "campus ethos" and "consequences of decisions" (p. 57-58), which seems ideal. I fear the reality, however, is that schools may be more inclined to go the "consequences" route. Whether or not we are willing to agree that times are tougher for students nowadays in terms of their ability to walk steadily the line between original and unoriginal composition, we must acknowledge that the utilization of online resources like Turnitin.com aims to police from the outside-in, rather than educate from the inside-out.
James P. Purdy (2005) has argued, "Instructors using plagiarism detection technology…seek to make visible students' acts of transgression. The goal here is far from pedagogical" (p. 277). In other words, in treating the symptoms rather than the cause(s) - the crime of plagiarism, rather than the reasons why the student may have plagiarized in the first place - we lose the opportunity to teach about why plagiarism is wrong.
The Concept of Intellectual Property
Beyond the loss of learning involved with this use of technology, there are issues of legality that collide with issues of pedagogy and (pre)judgment of our students. As one who has used Turnitin.com a handful of times for the first time last semester, I can attest to the confusion that decision has brought me. When I do suspect that pieces of a student's text may have been intentionally or unintentionally copied (without citation) from elsewhere, Google is not always a catch-all, and Turnitin.com has been able to trace lifted chunks of text back to their sketchy sources. Nevertheless, the living spirits of my graduate school's institutional review board have haunted me, and I cannot help but to wonder what kind of Intellectual Property Rights infringement or acts of privacy invasion I have committed.
Of course, I'm not the only one to question the legality issues of such software usage; many concerned teacher-scholars in recent years (e.g., Carbone, 2001; Foster, 2002; Howard, 2001; Masur, 2001) have discussed the complexities of Intellectual Property as it relates to plagiarism-detection software. These concerns are further complicated when we take into consideration how we who use such software may be judging and then taking students to a kind of secret court without their permission.
Though I did tell students from the beginning of the semester that the school subscribes to and uses Turnitin.com, I think this hardly counts as acquiring their permission to upload their writing to its database. Further, the power dynamic itself involved in that first day of class, when a teacher attempts to put down the proverbial foot and establish rules and expectations, doesn't exactly open its doors to students' questions about the protection of their Intellectual Property. In addition, many students don't even understand fully the concept of Intellectual Property, let alone realize that such protection exists.
In one rare case, the issue has seen some international coverage, thanks to McGill University student Jesse Rosenfeld, who - after refusing to upload his essays to Turnitin.com and whose teacher subsequently failed him on those essays - appealed to the school's senate committee and won (Grinburg, 2004). But such cases are few and far between, which further calls into question students' lack of knowledge about their rights, our preconceived notions of them as guilty from the get-go and the secrecy of institutions' and teachers' policing of their work.
Roots of Consent
It's important to note that, for a variety of reasons, not all universities practice the same regulations around education about and asking for students' consent with respect to the distribution of student work. "Work," in this discussion, could mean anything from an assigned blog posted to a course's Blackboard site, to a comment a student makes in conference or in class discussion, to a research paper written as the culminating project for a course.
Further, "distribution" could mean any kind of re-presentation of students' "work" in a professor's conference paper or publication, to a school database or file where past student papers are kept for future reference, to the use of a past student's essay in a future classroom lesson.
Differences in policing around issues of consent may stem from any number or combination of rationales:
During my time as a graduate student and qualitative researcher at a Research-1 institution, where the stakes around consent from human subjects were very high, I grew to understand clearly and be thankful for the policies of its IRB. My continuing work with the IRB during my research led me not only to realize the importance of the IRB's protection of me and my work, but also to cultivate a vicious, rather lioness-like sense of protectiveness over research participants. I held myself to a standard of representing their work and words as accurately as possible, all the while working within a clearly defined set of research boundaries.
Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
For all of my diligence inside an IRB system, however, I'm not sure that we teachers (let alone students) are educated enough about what is ethically involved when we allow that external thing "that can think for itself" to scan and warehouse students' written work. Consent is all very well when an institution forms a figurative protective dome over its researchers and researched, but we cannot deny the fact that Turnitin.com is, indeed, a kind of reciprocal outsourcing.
While we are using the labors of the software, it is using the work of students to build its business. I'm not sure that students would want to give their "consent" for that (unless they were getting paid for it). And though the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) intends to protect students' educational records (which includes written papers), that protection seems only to pertain to those papers that have been "officially" graded. It does not clearly specify protection for ungraded writing (and Turnitin.com even acknowledges this fact in their "Legal" discussion).
And, no, it's not enough to put the uploading in the hands of students (see murky power dynamic addressed in the first section) and assume that they've done so willingly and knowledgably. Though one answer may be to ask students to sign an agreement that informs them of their rights and asks them to give their consent to have their work uploaded (by them or by their professors), their "consent" still involves the issue of guilt before innocence, and leaves me continuing to wonder about the problematic intersection of power, ownership and the tricky "business" of cheating. I shudder at the prospect of such toxic mistrusting perceptions of students infiltrating our writing (or any) classrooms.
I wonder, too, how many students would happily comply with submitting their work to Turnitin.com after we honestly informed them about the blurry lines of legality concerning their Intellectual Property Rights and the commodification of their compositions, or after they read some of the literature already out there (including the piece we've compiled here). Without that information clearly and honestly provided to them, aren't we engaging an underhanded, dishonest pedagogy? Aren't we, too, guilty of misrepresentation?
Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
by Tracy Ann Morse
As a new faculty member at The University of Tampa, I took part in orientations that covered many aspects of the new community I joined. One of the topics covered in one of those orientations was the school's subscription to and use of a dominant anti-plagiarism system: Turnitin.com. Prior to this orientation, I was familiar with Turnitin.com. However, this is the first institution where I have taught that has programmatically instituted and encouraged the use of the service.
As we were given the institution's login and password by the Associate Dean of Students, I scratched down the information in the margin of a handout. As part of her presentation, the Associate Dean of Students quoted statistics from a voluntary survey conducted with the institution's students. These statistics conveyed that more than half of the students taking part in the survey self-reported they often cheat or plagiarize.
This informal statistic is in line with national statistics that state:
On most campuses, more than 75 percent of students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments (Finkel, 2005, p.7).
In "Sticky Fingers on the Information Superhighway," Ed Finkel (2005) cites the research of the founder of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, Dr. Donald L. McCabe, to show the prevalence of plagiarism and the cavalier attitudes of students towards plagiarism: "The percentage of students who say they had cut and pasted material from the Internet rose from 10 percent in 1999 to 41 percent in a 2001 survey, with 68 percent saying it wasn't a serious issue" (p. 7).
While many students may casually view their plagiarism as unimportant, many universities, like The University of Tampa, are instituting programs to prevent and catch plagiarism. At the orientation I attended, the tone of the Associate Dean's presentation on plagiarism at The University of Tampa was matter of fact. Yet, we were encouraged as new faculty to "police" the students we taught by submitting their writing to Turnitin.com before grading it.
Responsibility for Writing
I have not used Turnitin.com and did not plan to start after this orientation with these new statistics and warnings. As the semester progressed, many first-year writing faculty members began conferring with one another about what they do when they find plagiarism. These discussions raised the issues of whether or not to use and how to use Turnitin.com. While I agree with many of my national colleagues that problems relating to violations of FERPA and to the intellectual property of students (see Foster, 2002 and "Teaching about Plagiarism," 2005), I am considering instituting the use of Turnitin.com.
As a way to settle a conflict between my teaching philosophy and the plagiarism policing being asked of me, I am examining the merits of using Turnitin.com as a tool for revision. I argue that a proactive response to plagiarism, such as class discussions and assignments examining the many complexities and implications of plagiarism combined with students adopting Turnitin.com as a writing tool allows instructors to engage students in responsible academic writing.
My teaching philosophy, in general, asks that students take responsibility for their own learning. Only recently have I been challenged to think of this philosophy and how it applies to my policy of plagiarism. While I recognize that many students, especially freshmen, are unclear what plagiarism is, I have not made it common practice in my teaching repertoire to teach about plagiarism.
In "Responding to Plagiarism," Alice Drum (1986), points out that many instructors neglect examining and working on how not to plagiarize in their delivered curriculum. Drum observes even the rhetoric textbooks we use inform students what plagiarism is in a one-sentence definition and then states a warning not to commit it without providing students exercises to practice ways of avoiding plagiarism (p. 242). As a first-year writing instructor, I argue it is crucial that I teach students about plagiarism and how to avoid it so they can take responsibility for their own writing.
While Turnitin.com advertises on its website to be a plagiarism prevention tool for students, general consensus is that it is used to police plagiarism and nabs those students who are guilty of the offense. Turnitin.com boasts that it is contracted with over 5,000 institutions worldwide, and one report states that "about 400 colleges in the United States [are] on its client list" (Foster, 2002). Rather than using Turnitin.com as a prevention to plagiarism, many instructors rely on it to upload students' final drafts and wait for a report documenting how much of the essays are plagiarized. This method of using Turnitin.com is what was suggested to new faculty at The University of Tampa.
There are multiple problems to this method of use. One mentioned earlier is whether or not students have given consent to their writing becoming part of Turnitin.com's database. Once a student's paper is uploaded to Turnitin.com, that paper is copied to its database that has grown to over 4.5 billion pages (www.turnitin.com, 2005). One way many instructors address students providing consent to their papers becoming part of Turnitin.com's database is by having students submit their own papers to the system that then forwards the report to the instructor.
Another problem is that the system is set up in such a way to not encourage instructors to talk with and examine with students what plagiarism is and why it is important to document all borrowed information - ideas and words. Like other systems designed to evaluate essays, Turnitin.com is not a tool that is used to teach. However, as the discussions at many colleges turn towards plagiarism maybe it is time we look at Turnitin.com as another tool to add to our teaching repertoire as opposed to our grading repertoire. One way Turnitin.com can potentially help students is in focusing on revision.
A Focus on Revision
It is often hard to get students to understand revision as something greater than making corrections. However many times I breakdown the word for students-re-vision (to see again in a new way), it is always the case that a student in her revision plan memo will write, "I plan to fix my grammatical mistakes and spelling." Maybe by using Turnitin.com, students will be able to see their revisions in a new way.
Since Turnitin.com retains every submitted paper in its database, it is possible to submit different drafts of the same paper and learn from the plagiarism report generated from Turnitin.com how much one draft has changed from the next. The benefit for students is that they can have a quantitative report in the percentage referring to how much of their draft is the same, or "plagiarized" in Turnitin.com terms, to their previous draft submitted to the database.
This report will also highlight for students any public material borrowed from outside sources. Students and instructors can then use these reports to examine the writer's documentation of the borrowed material. Using Turnitin.com as a revision tool allows students to take responsibility for proper documentation and provides a forum for bringing teaching on plagiarism into our curriculum.
While students work through their processes of writing and rewriting using Turnitin.com, class discussions can generate thoughtful reflection on plagiarism. In addition, instructors can teach students about intellectual property and copyright. Students may want to examine the ethical questions that arise in Turnitin.com's practice to save every submitted paper, including their own and what feelings they have about adding their writing to the database.
Students may even gain a sense of ownership when it comes to their writing-even identifying as writers. While I can come up with some positive ways to use Turnitin.com and possible positive effects from students engaging with the tool, I am still torn with requiring students to use it. My inclination is not to force students to use Turnitin.com, but make it optional. Students can take responsibility for their own writing processes and the tools they wish to employ.
Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
by Joanna Castner Post
As part of our First-Year Writing Committee, I have welcomed the opportunity to think through what has been just a gut-level distaste for a particular tool, Turnitin. Some students in my classes have plagiarized, both purposely and through confusion about the expectations for academic writing. So why wouldn't I welcome a technology that could help me catch the transgressors? The question, for me, led immediately to the answer: I don't want to think of students as "transgressors," and I don't want to develop a pedagogy and consequent class environment built around that view of students. Further, I don't believe that such a pedagogy could hope to address successfully the complexities of plagiarism.
If one accepts postmodern theories of knowledge and authorship, the line between plagiarism and acceptable academic writing is terribly thin and must be enormously confusing for students with even the best of intentions. Composition scholar Rebecca Moore Howard explains this problem well with her concept of patchwriting, which on one end of a continuum she defines as "…rearranging and slightly altering phrases and sentences from a source text" (1999a, p. 87). But Howard argues that patchwriting spans from that end, often characterized by our summarizing efforts as we try to make sense of difficult texts, to sophisticated and acceptable academic writing that is actually a complex soup of others' words meshed with our own.
Irene Clark quotes Helen Keller in what could be seen as a nice metaphor for understanding this latter end of the continuum for patchwriting:
It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read because what I read becomes the very substance and text of my mind. Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew (1999, p. 166).
In Standing in the Shadows of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators, Howard expands on the concept of patchwriting by arguing that it is the method by which we become scholars. It is a form of mimesis, and by placing patchwriting in the category of plagiarism we place a barrier in the way of our students becoming scholars. She explains:
But there was something wrong with my teaching. My zeal to socialize them into the avowed conventions of academic writing was actually preventing their learning. Patchwriting was for them-as it is for us all-a primary means of understanding difficult texts, of expanding one's lexical, stylistic, and conceptual repertoires, of finding and trying out new voices in which to speak (p. xviii).
Mike Rose (1989), in Lives on the Boundary, is another scholar who has identified difficulty in comprehending texts as a primary reason behind unsophisticated patchwriting, and both Howard and Rose have very useful ideas for helping students become better readers. Using Turnitin as a tool for policing students would simply bypass any reading problems and lead too hastily to punishment.
Skill and Creativity
In addition to reading difficulties, I believe some students' writing falls into the early patchwriting category because they misunderstand the nature of skill and creativity, and these are problems a policing tool could not hope to address. An example will illustrate: I oftentimes read Stephen King's On Writing (2000) with my first-year writing students. King discusses many writing concepts, among them various ways a writer might come up with story ideas and whether or not run-of-the-mill writers can become great writers. These particular passages open the way for an interesting discussion about the nature of skill and creativity. In one of the passages, for example, King writes:
…I don't believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by self-will (although I did believe those things once). The equipment comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means unusual equipment; I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn't believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time (2000, p. 4).
I usually open the discussion by asking students if they believe writers, or other kinds of skilled people, such as painters or basketball players, must be born, or if they can be made, and I ask, at the same time, if they believe the question can be answered in a black and white way, or if there are perhaps ratios for success, such as so much talent, plus so much drive, and then a certain measure of education. Many students believe skilled people are born as such and that no amount of hard work or education will improve their skills in a substantive way. So, many students seem to agree with King that although they might be able to improve their writing to some limited degree, they will never be bestselling authors unless they were born to be.
After discussing these issues, I like to bring in the term creativity and have students come up with their own definitions of it and then compare/contrast them with this quote from King:
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they come up (2000, p. 25).
The debate here is often whether or not creativity is a skill that can be learned. This debate is especially interesting because while King seems to argue here that this particular creative technique is something that just happens automatically, the illustrating story afterwards can be read as showing that King discovered this technique and then became adept at using it to develop story ideas. Again, many students believe that people must be born creative, that creativity is not something that can be learned or developed, and it certainly cannot be analyzed and broken down into techniques that can be used to think in new ways.
Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
While the beliefs above might not seem extreme, I do think they are harmful in the writing classroom and tie closely to plagiarism issues. Although it is perfectly fine for students to have goals and interests other than becoming bestselling authors, I worry that the belief that hard work and education can have only marginal effects on their writing ability will keep them from doing their best work and perhaps discovering more talent than they ever knew they possessed, and/or shirking their writing work and never understanding that they don't have to be bestselling authors to put their always-improving writing skills to good use. In short, I don't want student beliefs about skill and creativity to become self-fulfilling prophesies in the writing classroom, and I think they do for many students, the same students who may use such beliefs to justify downloading essays from the Internet.
Further, most students don't understand that creativity and skill are often conceived in academia as dialogue/engagement with accepted authors and their texts, and then, when and if they do, they may not believe they are qualified to engage the text because they lack the right kind of birthright. As Gerald Graff explains, "…schools and colleges represent the culture of ideas and arguments" (2003, p. 2).
Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they [academics and intellectuals] have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument" (2003, pp. 2-3).
Graff goes on to argue that the very way universities organize the enterprise of learning hides these moves from students. Students can't discern, in other words, that these are the moves that are valued by academics and expected from students because the fragmented nature of general education requirements, for example, obscures disciplinary and interdisciplinary arguments, as well as the nature of disciplinary discourse as essentially argumentative. I find it difficult to think about plagiarism without also thinking about Bakhtin.
Many of the authors in Perspectives on Plagiarism, a particularly inspiring collection for me, also used Bakhtin to frame and think through the issues under discussion here. First, there is his wonderful explanation of the ways our very discursive being is made up of pieces of others. Our internal dialogue is made up of every degree of patchwriting, and every conversation with others consists of the same kind of communication, that which is radically blended with others' words, transformed, stolen, extended. Our internal, external, and textual communication cannot be anything but akin to patchwriting in its various forms. I interpret Howard's patchwriting to be much the same thing as Bakhtin's speech communion. He explains:
Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word 'response' here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account" (1986, p. 91).
Thus, although students don't recognize it as such, they practice creative engagement with all kinds of communication everyday.
A Stimulus to Creativity
But even if they do make such a connection, some students will not believe they were born with the level of skill and creativity to be able to engage published authors well. I think these beliefs, coupled with the pervasive notion that they cannot use the first person pronoun in any of their writing, give the texts we assign in writing classrooms, as well as the research students obtain on their own, the aura of what Bakhtin calls monologic discourse. Bakhtin explains that such discourse "…is indissolubly fused with its authority-with political power, an institution, a person-and it stands and falls together with that authority" (1981, p. 343).
This means that people don't feel they can enter into any kind of speech communion with that discourse. They can't transform, question, or extend it, for example. So students reading an argument in a text with such an aura would not feel comfortable engaging with it in the expected ways. In addition, so many students have heard over and over again that they can't use "I" in their writing.
I don't think I've gone one semester in my teaching career without a student asking if they can use "I" in their papers since my writing assignments seem to call for their own opinions, and they become confused about how to present an opinion without writing in the first person. Such a belief does not help students conceptualize significant engagement with a text. Such engagement has to come from "I." Sue Carter Simmons explains this issue as set in nineteenth-century colleges:
Other constraints generally left students with little voice or control over the papers they wrote. Composition pedagogy forced students to 'disown' their papers by forbidding first-person pronouns and assigning topics and particular forms. Such practices left students with little ability to use personal experience in their writing and few strategies to mark their texts with their own voices. (1999, p. 42)
She lists these pedagogical practices as encouraging of plagiarism. When students don't believe they can interact with a text in ways that will result in disagreements, extensions, transformations, etc., students are left with mere summary, or the kind of patchwriting that Howard explains is often labeled plagiarism. None of these complex misconceptions can be addressed through the policing tool Turnitin. A policing tool skips over them entirely.
Engagement and Success
However, the position that students may unintentionally plagiarize as they learn to work through and understand difficult texts, engage them in substantive ways, and then construct their own writing about them does not address the other extreme, the unethical intent to plagiarize.
For example, many would argue that students who download papers wholesale from the Internet demonstrate dishonesty, regardless of the causes for such an action, and that they must be punished. My argument, though, is that intent should not change our pedagogical response. Students will plagiarize.
Let's use the short time we have with them to address the problems leading to plagiarism rather than using it to police them and name them transgressor right from the start. Let's focus on helping students learn what it means to engage with their sources. Let's work with them through the entire writing process, which includes making sure they are learning effective reading strategies. Let's teach engagement with sources through class discussion, reading responses, comments on drafts that point to the ways they need to engage more deeply, and final comments on products that model engagement by engaging them as writers themselves.
Any downloaded draft, then, would just become part of the invention stages of a writing project. If teachers don't allow students to shirk engagement, the extreme forms of plagiarism will disappear, and as students engage sources more and more, the lesser forms of it will be transformed into acceptable, sophisticated patchwriting.
Conclusion
During the authors' drafting and collaboration processes for this article, we discovered numerous questions and reservations about software applications such as Turnitin's which covered a broad range of issues-pedagogical, philosophical, ethical/legal, and practical. We determined that there are uses for this kind of software, and that there are inherent messages implied by the use of such applications. We always came back to the Rowling quote from Harry Potter that serves to introduce this article, that a primary reservation about Turnitin or related technological application is its standalone us. That is, we fear that thoughtless institution of any technology for the sake of its newness, glitz, or time-saving qualities would be problematic at best.
We found that an about the Amish and their thoughtful integration of technology into their communities really spoke to our discussion. The Amish, a community probably most known for shunning modern conveniences, has a complex, thoughtful process for deciding if and when to incorporate modern conveniences into their lifestyles (Rheingold 1999).
In his article "Look Who's Talking," Howard Rheingold discusses how the Amish model could serve as an important lesson-and example-for the wider technology-loving American culture:
New things are not outright forbidden, nor is there a rush to judgment. . . . 'Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?' is the question bishops ask in considering whether to permit or put away a technology." Using this careful consideration, the Amish have rejected individual electricity and cars, but have embraced disposable diapers and cell phones (Rheingold 1999).
Rheingold cites an Amish man he interviewed, who points out that the community is:
not worried about becoming people without religion or people who use lots of technology . . . rather, the Amish fear assimilating the far more dangerous ideas that "progress" and new technologies are usually beneficial, that individuality is a precious value, that the goal of life is to "get ahead. This mind-set, not specific technologies, is what the Amish most object to.
This position has relevance to our discussion here. As Rheingold asks, "If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?" This is a critical question for all university administrators and faculty. What is most important, after all? Catching plagiarists and punishing them? Teaching the philosophical arguments against plagiarism, or, more fundamental, what plagiarism is and what its consequences are (both punitive and intellectual)?
We should reexamine our own academic definitions and boundaries of plagiarism, and of the academic community itself. We should ask ourselves, once again, what our primary goals are as educators, as philosophers, and as keepers of intellectual standards and ideals. And then we should ask whether we are adequately sharing those goals with our students, and what we should do when those goals so clearly clash with the messages sent by the society outside the walls of our own ivory towers.
References
1. All students are required to take three Writing Intensive courses beyond the first-year writing sequence which, according to the student handbook, “emphasize writing as a process of learning.”
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