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Turnitin.com
I’ve posted on this in the past, but I just found a hilarious quote on a website called Turnitin.com. As far as I understand it, Turnitin is an electronic service which teachers can use to scan papers for plagiarism. I’m guessing it compares text to indexed web pages, or something like that, and then returns teachers with links to those sites along with the original source material which has been plagiarized.
Anyway, the testimonial that I find so amusing and ironic comes from a Dr. Gilbert Klajman, of Montclair State University. Klajman writes:
Turnitin once caught a 100 percent word-for-word plagiarized essay. It was of course already suspect, due to the extraordinarily high professional quality of the writing. But it did really help by sparing the effort of getting the proof.
So in other words, the professor was too lazy to go check and do the legwork for himself, and he decided to make use of new internet technology to help him speed along what would otherwise be a tedious time-consuming process.
HEY, WAIT A SECOND! Those are exactly the same reasons students plagiarize, you narc asshole!
Seriously though, plagiarism isn’t some kind of high moral crime. It’s simply that the models of knowledge that we use and the values we ascribe to information are changing / have already changed. You think kids who are raised with technology like file-sharing, blogs and RSS news aggregators are going to even think twice about the moral dilemma previous generations had with plagiarism? Not a fucking remote chance in hell! And more power to ‘em!
Besides that, all plagiarism says to me is that kids are learning how to solve problems. And the problems they are solving are not the ones their teachers want them to solve. Kids don’t learn how to know, they learn how to pass tests and get grades. Because that’s what they are measured by, not by their knowledge, skills or experience. That’s the root of this problem. Teachers need to get creative and think of solutions which won’t get them stuck on these archaic pointless problems. You don’t want kids to plagiarize research papers? Don’t make them do research papers! Make them do hands-on projects where they get to think and act and experience, instead of summarizing and regurgitating information that has nothing to do with them. Of course you’re going to get nothing but slop from that! Who the hell is surprised by any of this? Teach kids to make decisions, reason through problems and solve puzzles, and they’ll be so excited to research things that they won’t even think of copying somebody else’s work verbatim.
One of the big questions I’ve always had though is: is the kid who cheats and plagiarizes his way through school smarter than the kid who studies hard and gets good grades on his own? While the one kid may be an academic star who plays by the rules, the other kid understands something intangible and important about how the world works, and recognizes the relative importance of different facets of life, and knows how to prioritize among them. Those kids are displaying a kind of intelligence that we never even think to measure for, and that we certainly don’t teach towards. No wonder they are so good at gaming the system all throughout life, while meanwhile those of us who play by the rules hem and haw and stew in our own frustration while the cheaters climb all the way to the top with the greatest of ease.
September 5th, 2005 at 3:28 am
You comments make me angry, and it suggests to me that you haven’t spent much time teaching college courses or talking with people who do. It is not merely a case of a professor being “too lazy to go check and do the legwork for himself” (or herself). Prosecuting plagiarists takes a great deal of time, and that’s not time well spent on the part of a professor. We’re paid to teach, mentor, do research, serve on committees, and so on. It’s a huge waste of resources for us to spend our time tracking down plagiarists; our other students suffer as a result, since we should be devoting that time to our classes and other duties.
Plagiarism is a growing problem on college campuses, and a single case of plagiarism can take hundreds on the part of the professor of hours to research, document, and take through the requisite disciplinary channels. It’s not just a matter of a professor having a spare afternoon and preferring to play computer solitaire.
Plagiarists are not learning how to solve problems, as you suggest. Most plagiarism is done out of desparation, and it’s done very poorly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but plagiarists tend to be stupid. Frankly, that makes their plagiarism even more insulting to the professor - how dumb do they think I am? These are not clever kids at the cutting edge of shifting epistemological norms. These are kids who are too lazy, tired, desperate, or entitled to think for themselves. Good college teaching is all about teaching kids to “make decision, reason through problems, and solve puzzles,” but not every student is going to rise to the occasion. It is my job as a professor to evaluate whether a student is engaging the material in the course. If a student can’t make an honest attempt to learn, and if s/he instead lies and represents someone else’s work as her/his own, then that IS a moral failing. It’s called lying.
September 5th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
Actually, I taught professionally for several years and had to deal with these problems in an extremely short curriculum, 14 weeks full time. We took adults from zero computer training to database and web application programming in this time span, and then launched them full-fledged into jobs where they had to make good on those skills.
Computer programming is a field which is absolutely built on plagiarism. And the best programmers are also lazy and rampant thieves of other people’s code. The opportunity to grab somebody else’s code and pass it off as your own in such a situation is essentially what drives the industry. It’s not a moral failing, it’s getting the task at hand accomplished in the simplest possible way.
The thing we really had to grapple with though was how to get people to be able to do the coding and understand the logic for themselves. If they got onto the job site and couldn’t swim and do the work, they would get fired and we wouldn’t get paid. So it was a very tricky thing to balance between the two skills. And yes plagiarism is a skill and no, people that do it aren’t stupid and aren’t immoral.
I stand by everything I said here and all the issues I raised are completely valid ones based on my experience as a student and as a teacher, and as someone who’s working at the “cutting edge of shifting epistemological norms” as you said. You don’t need to agree with me. This is just a conversation, and that’s my perspective.
Anyway, all I’m suggesting is that if teachers don’t want to waste time trying to catch plagiarism, don’t operate according to a model which allows it. All the time they spend trying to catch plagiarists and moralize at them about how wrong it is could be better spent coming up with creative alternatives for educational assessment that don’t rely on tests, essays and projects that people don’t want to do.
September 5th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
the distinction is that traditional professorship is delivering private property into the classroom as educational material and expecting a synthesis of this material into something new. i`m surprised that using that model the arabs haven`t charged fees for use of the fonts or sued for copywrite infringement. whereas college and trade schools prepare people for jobs with up to date skills needed in the community.
the paradigm shift away from ownership of source material is difficult for universities at a time when people are demanding marketable job skills and not phds.
the whole of our educational system is in need of an overhaul when people are still beening prepped for university in high school when there is no market for the degrees.
it is an enourmous waste of time, effort and money. the educational system has become an ideology. a new religion full of dogma and a priesthood protecting hidden truths.
September 5th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
Tim, clearly you and I have taught in very different settings. I wrote from my perspective as a college instructor in the humanities. I haven’t spent any time thinking about the ethical and epistemological norms for programming. It sounds like it would be interesting to think about. However, in my experiences with plagiarism, which have involved students writing papers in the humanities, the students haven’t plagiarized cleverly (of course, if they do a really good job, I wouldn’t catch them). And they’ve chosen to plagiarize because they’re scared, lazy, or don’t understand what plagiarism is. I’m not claiming that all who plagiarize are lazy and stupid in all their endeavors. But I am claiming that in cases where students have to write papers and decide to plagiarize, more often than not the student does a poor job, doesn’t demonstrate understanding of the material, and doesn’t fulfill the practical goal of passing the paper or course. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid. Foolish, perhaps.
Given the necessity of having students write in order to learn the material I teach, I don’t see how I can make writing assignments absolutely plagiarism-proof. I have worked hard to be innovative and flexible, and to reach students with different styles of learning. In order to have the time to do that, I can’t spend my time tracking down and punishing plagiarists. I agree that that’s an absurd thing to do. But my reasons are different from yours.
September 5th, 2005 at 8:30 pm
Well, what you’re saying is that people skilled in plagiarism, you never notice them. That’s a major component to what I’m saying and our experiences match in that regard. Every so often a low-level student would deliver an extraordinarily professional project which you know they couldn’t possibly have done. In programming it’s easy, because all you have to do to test if they really understand it is break it. Take what they did and change it, or do an add-on project after that where won’t be able to do it unless they understand how the logic of the program works.
To a certain degree, I think regular writing works like that too, but you could test it in a different way. Obviously I don’t know your classroom environment too well a few things that spring to mind given the right possibilities. You could do add-on projects featuring orally presented or performed components. Anything that crosses it into a different media or format where they will have to examine, adapt and re-apply the existing information in a completely new way.
For example, say your students are required to take a 10 page paper and transform it into a 2 minute video presentation based on that paper. Suddenly the playing field is leveled. They can’t just plagiarise a video (especially if they themselves have to appear in it), and more importantly, they have to apply the knowledge in a new way. The students who did the work at the basic levels and wrote original papers are more likely to be able to adapt the essence of the material. But at the same time, the student who plagiarized is also going to learn a lot of things. They might even realize they are much better at making videos than writing research papers.
If you wanted to really tackle the bull by the horns, you could also have them intentionally put together a completely plagiarized paper. Instruct them to “Rip - Mix - Burn” as Apple advertized a few years back. But make it be about a completely obscure topic, or a topic which is essentially nonsensical or false. Have them remix the words of other people to prove things that aren’t true and that they never said. The whole thing could be billed as an exercise about communication, distortion and authenticity. There are many many possibilities.
Shit, I have a lot of ideas about this. I ought to jot these all down sometime.
September 5th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
PS. I just spotted this line in your response:
Is that really a given? Why is writing the only way to learn? Aren’t there multiple modes of intelligence and multiple styles of learning? Are you talking about the students’ learning or your assessment of their learning, and your having measurable milestones for their progress?
September 5th, 2005 at 9:44 pm
[…] re. The blog, which mainly focuses on matters of the occult and supernatural, recently ran a highly critical piece on turnitin.com, the plagiarism detection servi […]
September 7th, 2005 at 11:14 am
Hi Tim,
I have students present the material they’re learning in many ways, and I like the idea of using video or performance. I also like the idea of having students deliberately plagiarize in order to talk about the construction of knowledge. But they would have to be able to distinguish plagiarism from other forms of knowledge acquisition (although I hesitate to call plagiairsm “knowledge acquisition,” because it’s not clear to me what students acquire by engaging in it deceptively). A collegue of mine has designed and taught an entire course on plagiarism where she does the kind of thing you’re talking about.
And I stand by my claim that students need to write in order to learn. Absolutely. It’s not the only thing they need to do - I didn’t say that - but they definitely need to do it. They need to express their understanding of a text in their own words. That’s something that plagiarism robs them of. Also, writing is only one way to assess student learning. Most professors I know grade based on multiple criteria, including class participation, willingness to engage material, presentations, progress made during a semester….