EnMasse

[Vundo Draxon]

[elmateo]

I am likely a minority on this:

But why such the insane concern about plagiarism? I think any rise of plagiarism reflects a social problem that would serve better by dealing with the root causes not by implementing policing services which have highly questionable merits.

The problem is that we don't encourage education for self improvement. We encourage education to create divisions in abilities so that students can be packaged for the corporate world. Students are under an immense pressure to compete against their fellow students. Its amazing to watch the mark competition factor amongst student's gaging of performance. And that will very easily lead to feelings of inadequacy and the "need" to resort to academically dishonest practices.

From my perspective: who cares if someone cheats? What did they "gain" from that? Very little in my opinion, in corporate education land they gained a lot... Good for them! Some might say I "lose" because the university gets a bad "reputation" or I get compared to a "cheater" who did better than me. But you can start to see how these things are a product of an education system designed to evaluate people rather than improve people. Reputation is a marketing tool, and while it might indicate quality of education that is tangential. I am being "compared" to other students so that business can pick me or the other person - the need to differentiate people so that they can be "chosen" has a lot of downward pressure on the education system which makes the goal of improving everyone.

Not everyone enters the education system at the same "level". Education according to people's needs, results based upon abilities. Improving people should be the goal, not a system designed to rank them.

And I see plagiarism as the product of incorporating ranking into the education system, and as the market is making more and more demands on the education system there is greater pressure to find the cheaters.

I am not pretending there wasn't pressure from other places to rank people before market pressures, there are. But as the principle social-economic force of today, the deeper entrenchment of market forces because of neo-liberalization (especially after Mulroney, Martin, and Harris in Ontario) has had a negative effect overall on the education system.

[JPG]

Elmateo, you might think that is a bad reason to get an education, but I would guess also that you are in the minority . Higher education is not only a way to expand one' horizons, it's an investment, and in Canada, it's mostly a personal investment. When cheating occurs, the value of that investment is compromised unneccesarily. The duty of a teacher is to give us maximum return on our investments, an in the context of education, that means not only teaching what is required, but enforcing the most stringent integrity in the process.
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We are the youth, we'll take your fascism away...

[JPG]

Oh ya, maybe I should reply to Vundo's original post as well. I've never heard that the owner of a paper submitted on Turnitin relinqushes their ownership, but i have heard the comment that, because it is an American company, i can be subject to the provisions of the PATRIOT Act and therefore accessed by law enforcement if they desire to monitor that particular database.
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We are the youth, we'll take your fascism away...

[thwap]

I don't see where turnitin.com gets the right to ownership of the work of a student just because their professor turned it in to them to check for plagiarism.

Regarding the issues elmateo raised, I'll say that while tests are an annoyance, and it's possible that someone could later show evidence of having absorbed something, a few sensible tests are really the only way of seeing what, if anything, is being absorbed.

As an indication of what's going on, there's a numerical grade. Now, it oughta be possible to situate things such that these grades measure what a student has accomplished, without being used as a way to compare and contrast, and stream some students from other students.

I really don't see any other way of finding out if anything is being accomplished.

Regarding plagiarism, there's something to be said for pressure, corporatization, etc., ... but there's also the case that people buy papers and soar through university, without giving one single flying fuck about the whole arts n' science world of wonder that they're involved in.

Beer drinking air-heads without any poetry or idealism or passion in their souls.

Then there's lazy people who copy without learning anything. They can't even explain what the words in their sentences mean. They aren't learning, and they aren't trying to "stick it to the man" neither. They're just trying to get a grade to get a "good job."

I was a history student and I just couldn't fathom people with no interest whatsoever in the subjects, in the lectures, in the ideas, but they exist.

As do science students who copy their way to grad school and beyond.

[Caissa]

My understanding is that turnitin.com keeps an electronic copy of the paper in its database for subsequent papers to be compared against. Sounds like a diminishment of intellectual property rights to me.

[Senor Magoo]

[Caissa]

It is a fact that students do not give turnitin.com permission to profit from their writing. The larger the database the more "appealing" the service is to clients who believe it is the answer to plagiarism. I'll go as far to say students are coerced into assisting turnitin.com and the universities are complicit in this coercion.

I, too, work at a university.

[Catchfire]

babble had a discussion about turnitin.com about a year ago.

For the record, I have copyright concerns with google to, although those are vastly outweighed by my concerns about google's monopoly on access to information.

Like Raos, my major concerns have to do with a detrimental effect on the learning environment, and an overestimation on the effects of plagiarism. Combined with the fact that turnitin doesn't even work very well (it only includes other students' essays, it doesn't include academic journals, books or primary sources,) it's not a very good investment for universities. This is why those who have adopted it, are revising their policies and providing all students with alternative methods if an instructor requests text-matching software.

[Raos]

[thwap]

I'll acknowledge that tests aren't perfect, and that soulless morons can do well on tests (how? i don't know.), but what's the alternative?

[Raos]

Why not by being able to have closer associations with an evaluator? Small class sizes, where the prof can just ask questions, know whos answering, and continuously evaluate their understand throghout the term? Make notes about who asks what sorts of questions in class, not that people who don't ask questions don't understand the questions, but regardless of somebody's mark on a test, if they are consistently asking intelligent questions to clarify the material, do you really need a test to tell you if they're understanding anything? Have debates, evlaluate who's able to participate and contribute. The idea, IMHO, is to vary the opporunities for students to demonstrate understanding of subject material, and not have to standardize everything.

Hell, my physical chemistry lab, halfway through the semester, and at the end, we were given a procedural grade, which was scored on preparation for experiment, competence and efficiency in performing experiment, independence, conformity to regulations and safe practices, and attitude. If my TA was able to evaluate all of that (like competence) throughout the term, without any form of formal testing, is it also possible for a prof to evaluate competence and understanding, presuming of course a smaller, more controlled class environment?

[DSquared]

[thwap]

Okay. That would cost real money, but it's something that my own limited imagination wouldn't have conceived of.

A barely relevant internet lesson just for the hell of it.

[Raos]

AH! I love cheat commandos! What a good time.

Ofcourse improvement would cost money. Hell, maintaing what quality we have costs money, and institutions haven't been successful at that. Over the recent period of time the U of A increased by about 8000 students, the number of tenured professors actually decreased!

[Bacchus]

[Senor Magoo]

[Bacchus]

I should add, the place where I regularly saw cheating (indeed would have if I could have) was in the courses you were forced to take to get your degree but were not part of your Major/minor. So for me, I had to take a economics course and a science courseas well as a sociology and a psych course. Science majors were forced to take a english, humanities and I think economics course
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I want to be challenged and made to think before speaking, not talked down to and treated as a child.

[Tehanu]

[Senor Magoo]

Ya, I seem to recall having made at least a few factual corrections once or twice already.

I always love this kind of "logic" though"

"Lightning is BAD! It sours milk!!"

"Actually, no, lightning doesn't sour milk."

"Ya? Well.... IT'S STILL BAD!!!"

I know that until we can create a utopia on earth, beginning with a one-to-one, human, empathetic, nurturing mentor relationship between students and teachers, Turnitin will be the evil authority that blows the whistle on those poor, stressed, overworked students who are only cheating because our Capitalist society tells them to.

But man, if you could see what I see, you'd change your tune. Since the invention of the internet, and the cut and paste function, cheating is everywhere. And it's not because Mike Harris made cuts, and it's not because Donald Trump rewards ruthlessness, and it's not because tuition hikes mean students have to work 7 jobs. It's because cheating is easier than studying, especially (as noted by Bacchus) when it's in an elective subject that you aren't all that interested in in the first place.
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[Admiral Awesome]

Tunitin isn't universally used. I'd say about half-my profs use it. I have a professor, who gets their TA to mark about half of the classes essays, and neither of them use it. Which is interesting in itself, as it shows that the TA for that class, isn't nearly as lazy as half the profs at my school when it comes to marking.

As for cheating itself, most students aren't that stupid as to think that they'll get away with it. Most students know full well, that ever since search engines were created, it's pretty easy to detect plagiarism without submitting a paper to turnit in. If anything a tool like turnit, just proves that certain profs are getting lazy. Personally, I think the comparisons between a message board, or google, having "property rights" over one's postings, and that of turnit in getting a "digital copy" of one's academic work so as to make their service more appealing to prospect of clients (as Cassia noted), where presumably one puts at least more effort into it than the average posting, isn't even worth making. I for one choose too post to this message board, or others, and don't particularly care if what I write becomes part of the "public domain", whereas in the case of academic writing, I'm not going to claim my papers are master pieces, but I'm not getting anything out of helping turn it in, yet I'm forced to give them my papers. And that doesn't sit very well with me. They should be forced to pay us for helping them.

[Raos]

Yes, well, proving Bush doesn't actually eat babies doesn't make him a saint.

If classes were smaller, so professors had a closer professional relationship with students, would they be better able to recognize work that a student didn't write themself, without having to resort to services like this? Wouldn't that be preferable?

[Catchfire]

What factual corrections have you made, Magoo? That's a nice condescending allegory, but it doesn't have anything to do with you "correcting" the "facts."

Commercial databases and periodicals are not Academic journals, by the way. Very few of those are offered in readable-text (ie, non-pdfs) and not even close to most journals are available online.

And while this part of the issue doesn't concern me so much, just because turnitin.com uses a different coding platform than Microsoft Word, doesn't mean that my work is just sitting on a server somewhere, incomprehnsible. Turnitin.com is using my work for something I did not consent to. The software can read it, and that's enough to raise concerns. You glossed over that bit in the last thread too.

[Senor Magoo]

[Catchfire]

In fact, turnitin.com does not use a vast majority of academic journals—in fact, the ones that would be most useful to a plagiarizer. In fact, most databases use pdfs, not full text, which turnitin.com can't read. In fact, it offers an awful lot of hoopla with not a lot of results.

And I already mentioned that I do have a problem with google. And I'm not alone--cf. googlewatch.com, etc. (Although, my dissent stems more with Google Books than google web search wrt copyright.) And posting on a website is communication--if I tell someone a secret, they are under no legal obligation not to tell someone else that. Google's just a really talkative busybody. I make that decision to post and publish on the internet. But if someone takes something of mine and publishes without my consent, why that's a completely different story.

While most undergraduate papers won't blow any minds, if I have a problem with turnitin.com and don't want my paper to aid their project, or fund an American company, tough nuts, I don't have a choice. And that's not the way a University should act.

[elmateo]

Magoo:

[Senor Magoo]

[Catchfire]

If wikipedia is the single most valuable resource against plagiarizing, why don't professors just check it when they're suspicious of plagiarism? Why, instead, would you buy an ineffective tool that implicitly distrusts all students and assumes guilt?

Also, I said that copyright issues with tii.com,as with google are not my major concerns. I think that such software runs counter to the ideals of the modern University, I think that tms does not work and is a poor investment, and almost all Universities—you know, the ones that want to stop plagiarism—agree with me. But, as always, Magoo, you and your "wit" know best.

And I don't know how you can ask us to "decompare" your absurd analogy to white privilege. It's rather like asking, to quote a book review I read recently, "If Tony Blair is an octopus, how come he only has two arms?"

Anyway, we didn't agree on two other threads about this, so I doubt we'll agree now.

[Stephen Gordon]

[elmateo]

Magoo, you are actually more lucky that I did not make a formal complaint about that statement.

If you don't understand:

You basically called my argument analogous to supporting "white privilege'.

If you work at a university, I hope you don't write such stupid statements on your students papers - more for their sake since you don't seem to care much yourself.

But here how it is different, just for your sake,

"white privilege" is the result of centuries of exploitation based upon discrimination.

Plagiarism, as we are talking about it from students, make be exploitative of the person who had their work stolen (though you have also made comments about people buying essays, in that case it is not). And while you want to make it sound like it is a horrible thing for me, someone who did not plagiarize their paper, it is not exploitative of me. It did not "take anything away" from me. If I lose something because someone else plagiarized that is a result of someone else's laziness, though I think I would have a very hard time pretending it was because I was "discriminated" against. Why is it laziness? Because people want to judge my level of education based upon something as meaningless as a "reputation" of a school. They spent little to any time actually to get to know me or my level of education.

Your analogy sucks, is offensive, and frankly should have been dealt with by a moderator.

[elmateo]

[Tehanu]

Is that a complaint? Sounds like it. Okay, I'll take it as one. Magoo, that was a pretty inflammatory analogy with some pretty unfair implications. Care to retract? Thanks!

[Catchfire]

[JPG]

Since when does a student have a right to not have their paper submitted to Turnitin. When a student submits their paper, as far as i am concerned, they are at least tacitly consenting to this. If their are problems with Turnitin, then we have to lobby for policies that prohibit using Turnitin. If the service actually compromises a student's intellectual property rights over the material, then the student's rights are compromised. But Magoo says they are not, so at the very least we should aproach that argument with caution.
_________________
We are the youth, we'll take your fascism away...

[Catchfire]

Most Universities that use tii.com permit "reasonable alternatives" to disprove plagiarism. So students usually have a choice. If they don't, they should. These lobbies already exist, which is why most Univeristies have revised their policies. And again, although there are some intellectual concerns, the other issues raised in this thread are much more troubling.

[Stephen Gordon]

For me, this is hypothetical: the stuff I teach is pretty technical, and it's in French. This sort of service would do nothing for me.

But you should remember that a university professor is not some sort of glorified version of a high school teacher: we have our own research agendas. If turnitin.com would save me time from doing the routine drudge work of checking for obvious cases of plagiarism so that I could do something else, I wouldn't hesitate to use it.

[Senor Magoo]

[Vundo Draxon]

[Admiral Awesome]

[Left Turn]

One of my big beefs with turnitin is that there is no guarantee that it won't detect plagiarism where none in fact exists. Students can't necessarily avoid making arguments in their essays that are very similar to preexisting arguments. Also, turnitin doesn't distinguish between the arguments students make that may already be out there, and the evidence used to back these claims. While the evidence used to back an argument should clearly be cited, the initial argument itself should not ever have to be cited if it was devised through independent thought. This should be the case even if someone else has also devised the same argument through independent thought. Turnitin can't make that distinction,

Suppose that I on an essay were to make the argument that Sadam Hussein was a despot. Even if I came up with this argument on my own, there's a good chance turnitin would identify it as plagiarism, since there's a good chance that someone else made that argument in an essay that was sent to turnitin, or turnitin might be able to find that argument on the internet. The very fact that I've posted that argument here might well preclude me (or anyone else, for that matter) from using that argument on an essay submitted to turnitin.

[Senor Magoo]

[NWOntarian]

[elmateo]

Magoo, ask any teacher about extra-curricular work. While they have withdrawn it in the past as part of "work-to-rule" actions they currently do plenty of things for their job, not part of their regular job description. Moreover, they are expected to do those things.

Huh.

[Catchfire]

Marking papers is not extra-curricular. It is part of our jobs if we are paid to teach a course. Furthermore, detecting plagiarism is part of that job, usually entrenched in University statutes. You won't find disagreement from me that most Canadian profs and instructors are understaffed and overworked, and I find tii.com an undesirable short-cut to hiring more staff.

To NWO: yes, it is alarmist and untrue that tii.com will "catch" plagiarism that ain't. That's kind of a weird thing to say. The prof still has the opportunity to exercise best judgement on a potential cheater, and all universities have tribunals where an accused student will have a chance to explain itself. It's not like tii.com has a monopoly on unjustly accused students. It's just as easy for a prof to do that, if not easier.

But, of course marks and competition matter. They matter for grad, law and teacher's school, some jobs request transcripts, and actively recruit the best students. While it's true that a B student may not differ too much from a B+ or B- student, there is certainly a difference between her and an A student, who will get access to the better jobs and graduate programs. But that's neither an argument for or against tii.com. People who cheat discredit people who don't, and the focus on marks pressures students to cheat. So what?

I don't think anyone who is aginst tii.com is for cheating, but I could be wrong. I just think there a better ways to check for it that enact a more positive university experience. I feel universities are critical to democracy, and so they should be an environment that nurtures liberal thought, rather than foster distrust. But, that's a contention that Magoo will doubtless mock.

[Caissa]

catchfire wrote: I don't think anyone who is aginst tii.com is for cheating, but I could be wrong.

My primary opposition is that tii.com profits from students, under coercion, increasing the size of tii.com's database.

I do await more legal cases around this isuue of coercion and not being paid for one's labour. ie. tii.com receives an electronic print of the student's work for its database without paying the student for his/her product.

[Senor Magoo]

[NWOntarian]

[Senor Magoo]

Of course. When Ben Johnson won that gold medal, the referee (didn't you know that there's a referee for the 100 m sprint?) had formed a personal relationship with Ben, so he knew right away, just by looking at the last three-one-thousandths of a second of the race that something was wrong. The actual blood and urine tests were simply a formality.

In the end, Johnson kept the gold because we all agreed that he must have felt enormous pressure to cheat, and we realized that there's more to life than winning. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's also when we stopped randomly checking athletes (which was such an unfair accusation of guilt to be making, and contributed significantly to the culture of mistrust and unhappiness that still clouds sports to this day)
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[elmateo]

Your resorting to such an example Magoo only further's my concern about your conception of education.

You are comparing it to a competition where society has placed value on the "winner". Exactly the concern I outlined, that people treat education as a competition.

I work with students who do not fit into the competition model, and attempting to make education "work" for them in this type of environment is exceptionally difficult. They aren't benefitting from it. They and society benefit from them getting a post-secondary education. They are not necessarily competing for the "top" spots in society, and yet that is where social pressures, like what happens in your example, lead them.

Marks for students as someone pointed out are not necessarily a bad thing, they can be used to direct improvement. Yes they can, but is that the principle function? Is that the direction we are taking in terms of the importance of marks?

In Magoo's head it certainly isn't, otherwise he wouldn't have shamelessly replaced a hateful example with this new one.

[Catchfire]

Equivalency arguments, despite the glee with which the drafter expunges them, always fail.

As elmateo said, professional sports are not universities. The university is based on qualitative examiniation, is founded on liberal arts education, and is a social good. If we change the way we evaluate them, especially with tii.com, we undermine them. I'm not arguing that students don't cheat, and the university should try to catch them. The point is that tms is an unreasonable affront to students' dignity especially since it doesn't even work very well. I haven't written an exam for a long time, but giving my student number is a minor inconvenience I can accept. The full package of tii.com I cannot. And, if I had a reason to take my exam outside of the common room for them (although, likely not to the washroom,) I have recourse to do so.

Ideas like tii.com reresent thin edged wedges bent on separating the Liberal Arts Univerity from the principles upon which it was founded. This and other concerns, like the compartmentalizing of space in University buildings, the corpratization of various governing boards, and a shifting administrative focus on quantitative are all symptoms of this separation. I'd much rather attack the root causes than tii.com, but what the hell.