The High Cost of Anti-Plagiarism

Concerns about plagiarism may have always plagued educators, but the unbridled access of the internet has brought a shrill sense of panic to the question. As to be expected in the 21st century, there is an online service for that. Turnitin is not a cheap service but some 6,000 institutions in 90 countries submit 100,000 papers a day to be checked for authenticity against the archive of 22 million stored papers. Gradebook functions, peer review and plug-ins with the major course management platforms are all available features for faculty. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, it's the whole "being presumed a cheater" thing, according to the unnamed minor plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Turnitin. Oh yeah, and the copyright violations. Though the Washington Post reported it as a local story on March 29, 2007 in McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service the 2 Virginia students are joined by 2 Arizona high school in the challenge. All are A students and resent the assumption that they have any interest in plagiarism. But that isn't the grounds on which they are seeking $150,000 for each of six individual papers.

The problem is that Turnitin keeps a copy of the students' papers. The plaintiffs maintain that they should be able to control how their writing is used. That is the basis of intellectual property rights and the students copyrighted their papers before they were submitted - some with explicit instructions not to be archived. But the papers were archived and it is unlikely that Turnitin will be able to make a very convincing argument for the principle of "fair use" reserved for educational, scholarly and news purposes. The real problem is that it is very tempting to think that technology can solve all of our challenges in the business of education. The father of one of the plaintiffs said it best when he said "he thinks schools should focus on teaching students cheating is wrong.'You can't take a person's work and run it through a computer and make an honest person out of them.'"