Turnitin.com: Today's University and the Problem of Plagiarism

Over the last few years, universities have increasingly been encouraging their faculty to use Turnitin.com in order to avoid plagiarism and encourage a culture of honesty among its student body. For those of you not familiar with Turnitin.com, it is an American institution which universities’ pay a great deal of money for. It is a service that allows staff and faculty to check students work for plagiarism. Essentially, students are forced to submit their papers to Turnitin.com and have it scanned by a massive database in order to determine its authenticity. If it has not been plagiarized, the database allows you to hand in your paper and you feel joy! If it has been plagiarized, you are instantly shamed and thrown in the penalty box, with the possibility of being kicked out of university in the future.

I have been teaching now for six years, and have now been given the opportunity to create my own courses as a part-time instructor. This has been a great supplement to working on the dissertation, and has given me a real insight into teaching political science in today’s wired world. One of the things that seems to happen today, as opposed to when I started university (only 11 years ago!), is that students begin and end their research on the web. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as there is quite a bit of useful information out there. Of course, the internet also makes the possibility of cheating far more tempting as there are tons of services to buy completed term papers, or to simply cut and paste information into a paper.

I am of two minds when it comes to Turnitin.com. Essentially, it presumes guilt before any action is taken. It assumes, I would argue, that all students are cheating and that the only way to clear yourself is to feed your essay into the machine and have a “big brother” like character give you the thumbs up or down. By presuming guilt, there seems to be something completely undemocratic about the whole thing.

Of course, given that the university is increasingly expensive and corporate, perhaps it makes sense to use such a service. Wouldn’t another solution be to hire more TAs and faculty in order to provide more instruction and time for marking and grading? Of course, on the other hand, given that universities are increasingly cutting services and trimming costs, perhaps a private cheating service is a partial solution to plagiarism. If plagiarizing really is a problem these days, perhaps this is a very real solution to maintaining academic honesty.

Is it a question of democracy and fairness or is it about academic efficiency, honesty and individual ethics? An interesting question that is not easily answered.