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Turnitin brings awareness, honesty
By Ruthanne Johnson
rjohn180@mscd.edu

Last year Metro tested a website that uses a network of search engines and databases to check student papers for plagiarism.

In a successful two-semester pilot program, students submitted their papers online to Turnitin.com.

According to Metro faculty member Tara Tull, who spearheaded the program, although plagiarism is not widespread among Metro students, the problem should be addressed in order to advance the school’s standards and to keep the students honest and learning.

Tull said many students are unaware of what actually constitutes plagiarism.

To more clearly define the parameters, Turnitin.com offers browser information on the subject, stating that the crime even includes “copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not.”

For Metro students caught committing intellectual property theft, penalties can include failing grades, suspension and expulsion, depending on the frequency and severity of the crime.

According to Turnitin’s research website, professional plagiarists can incur fines, lawsuits and even criminal prosecution.

After the 2005 pilot program at Metro, Tull conducted a survey asking 325 students from 23 classes about their experience with Turnitin.

Of the 325 surveyed, 37 percent wrote positive comments, 35 percent commented negatively and 27 percent remained neutral.

In addition, 107 of the 325 felt that Turnitin would “enhance the academic integrity of a degree from Metro.”

Some students, however, wrote that using the plagiarism-prevention website was both time-consuming and a “hassle.”

Other concerns included a feeling of being “guilty until proven innocent,” as well as privacy and copyright issues, since Turnitin retains the right to keep all submitted papers in their database for future comparisons.

John Barrie, CEO of Turnitin’s privately held parent company iParadigms, said in response to privacy and copyright concerns that since the inception of iParadigms and Turnitin in 1998, his company has never been sued or threatened with a lawsuit.

“We employ the thirteenth-largest law firm in the country, and they confirm there are absolutely no copyright or privacy issues with our program,” he said.

Barrie said Turnitin advertises that it uses student papers solely for cross-referencing to check for plagiarism, and their database is not searchable or accessible for anything other than cross-referencing and originality reports.

Margaret Burke points out in her article “Deterring Plagiarism: A New Role for Librarians” that the program “can act as a deterrent against collusion and can actually protect student papers from being plagiarized by other students since their work will show up as a match in the Turnitin database at the time of submission.”

Statistics from Metro’s Information Technology department show that Turnitin is utilized by 168 of more than 1,200 full-time and part-time instructors.

Since spring, 6,137 students have submitted 14,902 papers.

Of those papers, 14,571 originality reports were generated for comparison.

Once students log on to Turnitin and submit a paper, an originality report matches phrases, sentences and paragraphs and is then sent to the professor.

Roughly 4 percent of all papers submitted were found to be 75 to100 percent unoriginal.

Brian Zastrocky, director of Metro’s IT Services, said that number has fallen as more professors sign on to the Turnitin program.

Although Turnitin is merely a tool and not foolproof, Tull said the program has been useful for Metro’s staff and good for the school’s overall profile.

According to Barrie, Turnitin currently serves 5,500 institutions in 90 countries, with a database that includes over 22 million student papers, hundreds of thousands of journals, periodicals and news publications, and digital libraries of more than 2 million books.

Barrie came up with the concept for the web-based plagiarism prevention tool while completing his doctorate in biophysics at the University of California, Berkley.

While student teaching in the neurology department in 1994, Barrie became familiar with plagiarism after he developed technology that allowed students to peer-review each other’s papers.

“I thought the peer review would help them advance their writing skills, but instead some took advantage and began printing off other’s work and turning it in as their own,” he said.

The experience highlighted the extent of plagiarism for Barrie, who felt that if that much cheating occurred in his own department, the probability in other departments, colleges, educational institutions and publications around the world was exponential.

“I realized these students were not only robbing themselves of an education but also advancing unfairly over honest, hard-working students,” he added.

A survey conducted by Professor Don McCabe of Rutgers University in 2004 found that of “30,000 undergraduates at 34 colleges, 17 percent admitted to cut-and-paste plagiarism using the Internet.”

Not only do students commit intellectual property crimes, but professional writers, journalists and others do so as well.

Because of the sheer enormity of Internet literature and the temptations it brings, Turnitin clients have begun to include high schools, corporations, law firms and nonprofit organizations.