I’ve fully embraced the benefits and strictures of being a professor in the digital age. In both my online courses and live ones, I have come to rely upon our online classroom portal to disseminate course information, post reminders, log grades, and to serve as the primary method by which students turn in their papers. I don’t know if it is necessarily sounder to do everything electronically, but it’s a system that’s been honed course after course and seems to work well for both sides of the lectern. Still, there are aspects of it that trouble me.
Every paper turned in to my class Dropbox gets automatically run against TurnItIn’s plagiarism-detection tool. I detest plagiarists; they are the bane of my professional existence. I’ve done my best to stamp out plagiarism with antiformulaic assignment prompts, rotating exams, and gentle reminders through the semester that committing plagiarism invites the devil into your soul. Still, I get students who, either from Machiavellian overconfidence or through abject laziness, plagiarize.
And so if asked, I’ll not pretend otherwise — I love TurnItIn. It’s painless, effective, and just as important, already there for me to use. It saves me some relatively significant number of hours each term, agonizingly Google-searching the paper of an unremarkable student who has suddenly turned into David Foster Wallace on the final exam. And when I am forced to pursue an instance of academic dishonesty, it provides a nice, tidy, official-looking report that tends to convince students of the authority and weight behind the meeting we are currently having. So I use it, happily.
But recently I got an email from a student concerned about TurnItIn on dual grounds. The student was nontraditional, and this was his first college course in some years. He was concerned first about accidentally plagiarizing, and wondered (naïvely, but completely understandably) if TurnItIn let students run their work through free to make sure this didn’t happen. Second, the student didn’t like the idea of being forced to surrender his work to a company that would make money from it. He was articulate, respectful, and tentative.
My knee-jerk reaction, which thankfully lasted only a minute or so, was to throw up shields. Tell the student that such antiplagiarism tools were clearly spelled out on our syllabus and that by staying in the course each student was assenting to such measure in the name of academic integrity. But in typing this into Outlook I decided I should probably be sure this was actually the case, and so I called our university’s academic-integrity coordinator, who said she had never gotten a question like this before, but confirmed: So long as it was in my syllabus, I could do what I wanted.
I went back to click “send,” and discovered I was ambivalent about it. It must have taken some guts from the student to send that email to his professor, and at the very beginning of the semester no less. Plus, the fact that there was no standing university policy pertaining to what was a potentially explosive issue made the “it’s in the syllabus” argument seem astoundingly soft. Its reliance on student ignorance rather than legal standing made me curious if anyone had challenged it.
A little searching turned up surprisingly few lawsuits brought against iParadigms, the parent company of TurnItIn. But someone had issued a challenge. Six years ago a court weighed in, and the judge ruled in favor of iParadigms on four grounds, as summarized in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology:
“1) Commercial use can be fair use, and ... use can be transformative ‘in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work.’ TurnItIn transformed the work by using the papers to prevent plagiarism and not for factual knowledge; 2) The website’s use does not diminish or discourage the author’s creativity or supplant the students’ rights to first publication; 3) Using the entirety of the papers did not preclude fair use; and 4) TurnItIn’s use does not affect marketability.”
I’m not a lawyer, I’m a history professor. But I don’t really buy the “highly transformative” argument (the ruling itself admits they don’t actually change the documents at all but merely “use” the papers in a different way; probably Jacques Derrida would award me a demerit for saying this); nor do I really accept uncritically the “does not diminish or discourage creativity” one. I’ll also take issue with the point that it does not affect marketability. It completely misses the premise that one doesn’t have to be motivated by market value to produce an original written work (and so that shouldn’t be the standard to retaining full and exclusive copyright).
But even acceding to the premise, on TurnItIn’s own terms, should a student want to start up her own plagiarism-detection company and use the corpus of her own work as a starting point, she’d immediately run into the fact that TurnItIn can claim (rightfully) that it already has not only this student’s body of papers but more than 330 million other student papers. Talk about David and Goliath.
Do I keep feeding the beast or try some alternative? To what extent, if at all, have we as professors crossed an ethical line by blithely becoming complicit in this model over the last decade — such that TurnItIn is the only name in the game — and we’re now beholden to them in every practical way? It’s the flagship service of what is an almost-billion-dollar company, after all, with annual earnings of $50 million a year. Do plagiarism-detection services in and of themselves contribute to a false notion of original authorship when in fact the whole endeavor is much more complicated than we’d like to admit when marking first-year student papers?
It also made me wonder how many other concerned students there were among the undergraduate body and how professors engaged them. Why hadn’t the university’s academic integrity coordinator ever run into this issue before? If we’re supposed to be fostering the next generation of critical, engaged citizenry not only able but willing to step up to bat for themselves on issues such as these, we must be failing in some sense or another.
In the end, I told the student that I was sympathetic to the argument and that if he wanted to send me his papers instead of uploading them (since I can’t individually turn the detection function off) I’d take them that way. I’d have to check them manually still, I wrote, but it was a time investment I was willing to make. But this avenue won’t work as soon as two or five or 10 more students email me with the same concerns, so it’s not a long-term solution. It’s a Band-Aid and a relatively weak one.
Eventually, I’ll have to decide which is more important: my time, or any overriding philosophical concerns. And I know which one gets rewarded on a daily basis, and that leaves me uneasy, to say the least.
