In Your Own Words?

April 2nd, 2009

Lift a paragraph? Steal a sentence? Don’t cite a source? We suggest you call a halt to those shenanigans right now. Not only is it academically unethical (and incredibly lazy) but with new sites like Turnitin on the prowl, your sticky scholastic fingers won’t go unnoticed.

Thanks to this site, all a teacher or professor has to do is log in and upload a
questionable student paper in order to find out if it’s an original work or a clear case of plagiarism. According to Turnitin, the site is currently used by more than 450,000 educators and checks over 130,000 papers a day against a database of more than 75 million student papers and pages upon pages of web content. What’s more is that, as teachers continue to upload student papers, the database is steadily increasing with Turnitin expecting to reach 166 million student papers by 2010.

Turnitin hasn’t been without controversy though. As recently as 2008, students brought a lawsuit against the site, saying that it infringed on their papers’ copyrights. The judge, however, ruled against them, classifying Turnitin as providing a “public benefit.”

What do you think? Does Turnitin help the education system or hurt students’ rights?

ETA: Studentactivism points out that a report was recently released about Turnitin’s many false positives. View it here.

– Genevieve M. Blaber

Entry Filed under: General