My good for them is based on the uneasy feeling many people share and I feel quite strongly about is that forcing students to submit papers through Turnitin or other software is a breach of trust. All students are being tarred with the "you might be a potential cheater brush". The article states that another high school that uses the service - Broad Run, found only 3 cases of cheating in the first year of use and has found only another 3 cases since 2002. You could infer that Turnitin is working and cheaters have been deterred or you could infer that not that many kids at Broad Run high school cheat anyway and that the school is spending a whole lot of money for nothing.
The media and academics are often far too quick to haul students in front of disciplinary boards for cheating when in fact they have simply referenced poorly. I teach students about referencing and it is very rare that students get it right the first or even second time around. The students at B
Diane Schmitt
Senior Lecturer of EFL/TESOL
Nottingham Language Centre
Nottingham Trent University
Burton Street
Nottingham NG1 4BU
Tel 0115 848 6156
Fax 0115 848 6513
[log in to unmask]
________________________________
From: Plagiarism on behalf of Mike Reddy
Sent: Tue 26/09/2006 22:12
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Making money off students - Tail wagging the dog
Diane's "Good for them!" is what got me mad. The phrase "making money off students" put the cherry on the cake. I'm no defender of TurnitinUK - detection software does not solve the problem of copying, just the detection (mostly) - but from my understanding of the technical aspects of the way the database works, the 'use' of students' work is limited to the thumbprint that is stored. This would not allow Barrie or any other iParadigms employee to read and, therefore, use an essay; the only way that an author's IP could be abused. You might just as well say that all the words I have just used to type this email are the property of someone else. Of the electrons flowing through the computer that made up the email. The thumbnails produced by analysing the essays are rather like the results of me counting how many of each letter were used. Would the fact that ?? letter Ts were used be an infringement of my IP if you took the trouble to count it for yourself?
Whether or not IP belongs to the students or the universities - many of which have clauses defining ownership in the 'contract' signed on registration, but fewer have the procedures to regain that after coursework submission and marking - is another matter. Maybe, Diane could explain her remarks and suggest alternatives to using plagiarism detection software?
P.S. There really were 124 Ts used. 124 is therefore, my intellectual property.
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