Before Christopher Friend could complete the doctorate he had been working toward for years at the University of Central Florida, his committee chair needed to check his dissertation for plagiarism.
The chair, Stephanie Vie, trusted that his work was original. But she had to follow university policy, which requires all dissertations to be run through plagiarism-detection software.
Mr. Friend had shown Ms. Vie many drafts of his dissertation, and he believed she would have noticed if anything suspicious had popped up. He thought it odd that Ms. Vie had to upload his work to the plagiarism-detection software company Turnitin.
‘I’m developing this close, personal relationship with my graduate students, and then, all of a sudden, I’m saying, Well, now you have to submit your work to Turnitin.’
To administrators, policies like the one at Central Florida help ensure academic integrity. But to professors like Ms. Vie, an associate professor of writing and rhetoric who opposes the policy, it sends a message to students: The university doesn’t trust you.
“I’m developing this close, personal relationship with my graduate students, and then, all of a sudden, I’m saying, Well, now you have to submit your work to Turnitin,” Ms. Vie said. “It sets up a very mistrustful, gatekeeping, policing type of situation that goes against the kind of pedagogy I support.”
Turnitin is already widely used in undergraduate programs. It is a tool designed for shorter classroom assignments, and until last year, submissions were capped at 200 pages. Now the cap is 400 pages.
Most of the work submitted to the Turnitin website doesn’t come from graduate students. But once universities purchase the software, they’re free to use it as they please. In graduate programs, the software is slowly catching on. And at some institutions, like the University of Central Florida, its use has become part of campus policy.
For opponents like Ms. Vie, however, those requirements create a culture of suspicion. Graduate-program advisers don’t want to undermine their relationships with the students they supervise, but they worry that they won’t have a choice.
“It sets up students as potential plagiarizers right from the outset,” said Jesse Stommel, executive director at the University of Mary Washington’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. “Their first experience as a graduate student ends up being colored by this very negative approach to student writing.”
Mr. Stommel is a vocal opponent of sites like Turnitin. When graduate students are required to run their dissertations through the software, he thinks they learn to be suspicious of student writing.
“Many of those graduate students are going to be teachers themselves,” he said. “As teachers we often end up doing what was done to us.”
Support, With Caveats
Sheila Gregory started using Turnitin this year. She’s a professor in the department of educational leadership in Clark Atlanta University’s School of Education, and she works primarily with doctoral students.
In her department, faculty members use Turnitin for assignments worth more than 15 percent of a student’s grade. And starting this semester, they will run all of their students’ dissertations through the system as well.
“Turnitin is a wonderful tool — if it’s used correctly,” Ms. Gregory said.
She supports her department’s requirement, with a few caveats: Students should receive training on what plagiarism is, and how the software works. They should understand the software’s advantages and disadvantages — and they should know that their professors use it.
At Clark Atlanta, doctoral students are told that their dissertations will be run through plagiarism-detection software. For classroom assignments, Ms. Gregory includes the department’s policies in her syllabus.
“The syllabus is very much like a contract,” she said. “The students need to be aware of what you’re going to do prior to you doing it.”
Turnitin has more than 337 million student papers in its database. After teaming up with ProQuest in 2012, Turnitin added over 300,000 dissertations and theses. But that number represents only dissertations and theses obtained through the partnership, and doesn’t include submissions from universities.
Typically, Turnitin stores submissions in its database. When institutions purchase the software, they can choose not to archive their submissions. But students don’t usually have the same level of control over their work, or understand how the software functions. As a result, some opponents believe that Turnitin violates intellectual-property rights.
“There’s no compensation to the authors,” said Timothy R. Amidon, an assistant professor of English at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. “It’s the private sector finding a way to monetize intellectual property that should be, or is, in the public sector.”
In 2007 a group of high-school students sued iParadigms, Turnitin’s parent company, for copyright infringement. They argued that the company made a profit from their work, which they never agreed to hand over. The court ruled against them, saying that Turnitin’s business model fell under fair use.
“The entire contents of the paper are never exposed — only the matches,” said Chris Harrick, Turnitin’s vice president for marketing. “People look at Turnitin as way to protect their intellectual property.”
The court’s decision was clear, said Dan L. Burk, a professor of law at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in intellectual property. “A fair amount of case law suggests that, from a copyright standpoint, this isn’t really a problem.”
Yet some universities still act as if it is. At Cornell University, professors who want to use plagiarism-detection software are asked to provide students with advance written notice. Students at the University of Washington can decline to use Turnitin, the university writes on its website, because “they own the copyright to their papers.”
Turnitin officials say that if graduate students want to remove their dissertations from the company’s database, they can submit a request to do so through their university.
But sometimes students aren’t aware that Turnitin has a copy of their work. What if students don’t know their university submitted their dissertation to the site?
Nathalia Bauer, Central Florida’s thesis and dissertation editor, said the policy was listed in the university’s graduate catalog and on graduate students’ dissertation- or thesis-approval forms. “It’s a university policy, and it’s something they should be aware of,” she said.
Ms. Vie counters that students aren’t always given the opportunity to understand what it means to submit their work to sites like Turnitin. And even if they are, she doesn’t think the requirement should be mandatory. (Central Florida changed its policy this year — it’s going to run theses and dissertations through iThenticate, which doesn’t store work in its database.)
Until that changes, she will comply with the policy. And when she got the results back for Mr. Friend’s dissertation, nothing suspicious emerged. He earned his Ph.D. in 2014 and started a job at Saint Leo University, where he teaches writing.
