Don't Try This at Home, Kids
It appears my posting frequency is inversely correlated with work level. That is, I haven't had much time to type my musings since the semester started. And my work just increased this week after the first lab report of the semester was due. I now have four inches of lab reports to grade that I told myself I don't have the time to touch this weekend because I really need to be working on writing a paper for my IP class.
I have been enjoying my teaching, though I'm starting to observe the riduculous things students do, both silly and serious. Because there are 900 students in this intro bio class and 20 TAs who teach two or three lab sections each, it's difficult to catch plagarism. We use an online service to which students must submit their reports. The website compares all papers that have been submitted for that particular assignment and reports a degree of overlap. I told my students I wouldn't grade their lab reports without a printout of this originality report generated by the website.
In class this week, two guys had forgotten to print their originality report and wanted to get out of having to bring it to campus the following day. This is an example of one of their riduculous requests.
During lab when I came over to check on them one said, "Do you live on 10th or 12th Avenue?"
I said, "Yeah, why?"
The student replies, "Well, we see you running all the time. We live near you."
"Interesting." I was wondering where this conversation was going.
"Since you live so close to us, can we just bring our originality reports to your house?"
And on the serious side, one student turned in a report that shares a high degree of overlap with a single report submitted last semester. The website shows there are long portions with exactly the same wording as former student's report. Students have the chance to change a document and resubmit it with no penalty if a low originality score is generated the first time. Yet this student didn't take the opportunity to change a plagarized document. How can students do this and think they won't get caught?
posted by Hannah @ 2:26 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Hannah, I understand! I've had students copy material from the sample essays provided for them in the student guide. Somehow, there's something especially insulting about careless plagiarism--don't they know we can figure it out?
It seems the issue (as a whole) is a little less black and white than you make it out to be. Not the issue of whether cheating is good or bad or ok or not, but the whole service thing. Here.
I see the points brought up in the article, namely intellecutal property rights. But plagarism is so much easier in this day and age and harder to catch. Can you think of a better way to find plagarized assignments other than something like a Turnitin.com service?
That's like George W's argument for catching terrorists, and suffice it to say I have some issues with it: "I understand the points like privacy right and laws, but terrorism is so prevalent in this day and age and harder to catch. Can you think of a better way of stopping terrorists than something like illegal wiretapping and trolling international money transfers?"
Intellectual property rights can't just be bulldozed because ignoring them is the easiest way to catch plagarism.
This is not like wire tapping. The students are knowingly submitting their writing to Turnitin, and I guess if they don't like the idea, they don't have to take the class.
And the definition of a violation of intellectual property rights seems unclear to me. The students would still own the copyright to their writing if it were to get published, right?
The students don't have a choice to submit or not. Don't submit to the service - fail the assignment? Class required for your major? Oh well... Don't want to submit your High School history class research paper on principle to protect your intellectual property? Forget Harvard with that 'F' you'll receive... That's not a choice. And they do have to take the class. Especially at a high school level.
And it doesn't yet clear exactly where all this falls in terms of intellectual property, but a lot of it seems pretty troubling to a lot of people that know a lot more about this than we do.
But the George Bush analogy does hold a lot of water with regard to the fact that a lot of innocent people's rights are probably being violated to catch some 'bad guys'. These students don't have a 'choice' as you put it.
"And the definition of a violation of intellectual property rights seems unclear to me. The students would still own the copyright to their writing if it were to get published, right?"
Are they being compensated for their work's use on the site in comparing it to other works? Are they in control, legally, of the ways in which the work is used once it is turned over to the site? I don't think publication is the only issue. I think that if Turnitin is using students' work to screen for plagiarism, that students should be compensated for having that work be a part of the database. At the very least. Should students be allowed to not give permission for their work to used as part of a plagiarism database? I think so.
I'm also unclear on the exact nature of the claimed breach of intellectual property rights, although I can understand concerns about having one's paper stored digitally and accessed fairly easily by paying subscribers. I know at my school students have the choice of opting out and instead doing something else to document their writing process and use of sources (meeting with a TA to discuss their paper, writing a page about their writing process, or something else), but most students in my experience choose to upload their papers to turnitin rather than do the extra work that another option would require. I think as long as students understand how the process works it's fairly non-invasive (and certainly less invasive than wire tapping).
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