Firstly, a plea: the last digest had 80% material that was duplicated messages, probably because people hit reply, then other replied, etc, without using a blank email, which propagated the copying. It makes reading the thread of a conversation more difficult. If replying, could you please be careful not to reproduce the whole original each time?
Hi Ella and others concerned about "free" services,
There is no "free" in this World. Someone always pays somewhere, somehow. I would argue, even at iParadigms' expense, that no student enrolled at a subscribing institution should have to pay for the service, having already stumped up for tuition fees. We pay a subscription fee, and get a service, which we can make freely available to students ourselves. It is our litmus paper for allegations of academic misconduct, and so it seems fair that we are as transparent as possible with how/why the technology is being used. Students should never have to use alternatives to this gold standard.
Yes, they absolutely need training/support - a lot of academics need it too - to best understand the implications of originality reports (ORs). However, TurnitinUK isn't antibiotics, something to fearfully use due to concerns that easy access will allow immunity to evolve; there is no predator/prey co-development possible if students are guided in access to ORs for their work, and probably not even if they had full, repeated access, provide me the limitations (nothing is perfect, as there'll always be false negatives) are made clear.
Let's not make them pay twice, for iThenticate, Viper, etc. We should be being open about What/How/Why we are doing TurnitinUK authentication anyway, and involvement in the back end of the assessment process won't do any harm either in allaying fears and justifying our intentions.
Mike
P.S. See, no stuff unnecessarily quoted below
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