Since it is officially Plagiarism Education Week, an endeavor sponsored if not created by turnitin.com and it's subsidiaries, this week's post tries to do just that--educate our readers on plagiarism, specifically the use of Plagiarism Detection Services or PDS and the controversy surrounding them. What, you didn't know there was one? Many people don't. Their institutions buy these services to help regulate and encourage ethical source use (and as some detractors would add, to justify the ever increasing work loads). Instructors are often left out of these decisions and at many institutions are told that participation is mandatory, both for faculty and students. While the decision to participate in the DACC PDS (turnitin.com) is left up to the instructor, it is strongly encouraged as a tool to help with the perceived growing epidemic of plagiarism on college campuses. Since it is available and widely used, however, the standard perception is that using a PDS only presents a problem for students who are doing something unethical. Because...why else would our institutions be using them, right?
While many teachers rely on services such as SafeAssign or turnitin.com to help them detect and deter plagiarism as well as to teach students about correct source citation (and do a very good job of it), not everyone is a big fan of using computerized programs to address the issues surrounding plagiarism. Some teachers-and students-insist that PDS violate students' copyright privileges by using their papers to build the databases and to therefore make a profit from student work. Read more about the court case involving turnitin.com here: The Chronicle-turnitin.com case settlement.
Others are concerned about the ways in which these services are used in a haphazard way or incorrectly. Critics assert this sets up a hostile learning environment by implicating all students as potential cheaters and often leads to students being wrongly accused of plagiarism--an offense that has very damaging consequences at many institutions. Rather than trying to intentionally cheat on an assignment, many students use sloppy citation procedures which many rhetoricians would categorize as patchwriting. For more information on what constitutes patchwriting, you can view Rebecca Moore Howard's discussion of it here: Patchwriting Video from McGraw-Hill. Howard is a professor at Syracuse University, one of the lead researchers in The Citation Project, and the author of several publications dealing with plagiarism.
This year, The Conference on College Composition and Communication passed a resolution in which the conference fails to endorse the use of PDS. Although some discussions following the passage of this resolution want to cast this non-endorsement as the 4C's simply saying that PDS have no valid function academia or that those who pushed and voted for the resolution were a vocal minority of cranky pants academics who live a privileged existence few of us do (and believe me, "cranky pants" is quite a tame description for some of the name calling happening in light of this), the nuances of the resolution characterize a situation more complex than either of these treatments suggest. The resolution expresses concerns about how the use of PDS can, and probably often do, adversely affect both the teacher/student relationship as well as the relationship between teachers and their administration. You can read the full text of Resolution 3 which addresses this issue here: CCCC Resolution on PDS.
You can follow the ensuing debate this resolution generated among the academic community by accessing the article that recently appeared on the Inside Higher Ed webpage and reading it and the comments which follow at: Turning on Turnitin.
Some academics, such as those at Bowling Green State University's English Department, advocate openly resisting PDS sites and the rhetoric they use to generate business. Look at what they have to say about turnitin.com's efforts at greenwashing and re-branding in their article which compares the history and evolution of turnitin.com to another popular online source used by students, one instructors generally don't want students using--schoolsucks.com. See Turn it Down, Don't Turnitin....
It would be nice to conclude that the concerns raised by those who are skeptical of what a PDS has to offer in terms of teaching students about ethical source use could just be attributed to their Luddite tendencies or something similar. However, just this morning, a student came in to the Writers Room with a source based paper in hand. He wanted help going over "grammar and stuff" before submitting his paper to turnitin.com as he was required to do by his instructor. Although there was material laced throughout the draft that the student would not have had prior knowledge of and is not considered common knowledge, he didn't have anything cited either through the use of in-text citations, a list of works cited, or even the use of lead in or signal phrases. When I asked him about why he hadn't cited anything, he said that his instructor told him that's why they were turning their papers in to turnitin.com. That way they could see what percentage of the paper came up as a match to something else, and as long as it was in the "green" range, he was okay. That meant he hadn't done anything "wrong."
This illustrates one common misconception that several instructors have about turnitn.com. It seems as if some view the colored ratings associated with the originality report in a way similar to the government alert scale that is color coded. Green means all is well. Yellow is a paper we should be wary of. Red means something has absolutely gone ethically awry! Intuitively, this seems to be a correct assumption to make if anyone has had any experience at all with say...the US traffic system, too. Turnitin.com relies on these cultural underpinnings in the marketing of their service. They didn't just choose colors at random. Yet, if you really investigate how the colors are assigned, you find that they change as a result of the percentage of matched passages increase in a student's work. That is all. However, even a paper that is rated as "red" and has an extraordinarily high percentage of matched work is not necessarily plagiarized as long as all material is cited correctly. (Just as a "green" paper could still contain plagiarized passages.)
Is it a "good" example of college writing? Hmmm...probably not. Does it demonstrate that the student understands how to use sources (not cite, but use) in the way most teachers would like to see at the college level? Again, probably not. Did the student cheat? Did he or she take ideas from someone else and try to pass them off as his or her own? Uhmmm...not if they are cited, no. Did the student do the assignment as the teacher intended? Again, no, but that's not plagiarism. Just because he or she might have copied and pasted whole sections of other papers and strung them together to avoid work, that's still not plagiarism if they are cited. And, as many people who are against the use of a PDS would argue (and as turnitin.com says on it's own site), that's not something a PDS can account for. Whether the student simply knitted together other people's works in order to avoid doing the actual work required, or whether he or she did so because of a lack of understanding of what was wanted, how to do what was wanted, or even both is only going to be determined by interaction between the student and the instructor. And yeah, that's sometimes messy...and uncomfortable...and certainly not the "time saving" mode that turnitin.com purports to sell instructors and institutions alike. As a community college instructor with a five class load, overload classes as well as other professional duties, not to mention a life outside of work (or at least what passes as one for me), I certainly understand the allure of the convenience of using a PDS. This leads us directly back to the 4C's resolution.
Again, perhaps the student I tutored this morning just misunderstood what his instructor had said. Unfortunately, I've heard versions of that same story (in both of my roles as a teacher and a tutor) from too many students to think that's all there is to the story. And by no means do I intend to single out this one student or his instructor. My point, rather, is to demonstrate that since this is something I, as well as my colleagues, hear quite often, that the concerns voiced over the use of a PDS are valid. I know that my colleagues who use a PDS are doing so in what is their belief to be the best interests of their students. Unfortunately, just as many of our students are not well-versed in the ethical use of sources, I'm afraid many instructors aren't well-versed in using a PDS or what it might offer in the way of teaching and preventing plagiarism, not just policing for it. I know that certainly wasn't the case with me when I first started using one. I would imagine the same is true of others as well.
Perhaps our students are not the only ones who can benefit from becoming better educated on plagiarism. After all, even "doing your best" can only raise you to a certain level if you are being asked to work with a partial set of information. If you use a PDS in your class, make sure you are well-versed in its advantages as well as its limitations. Review the 4C's resolution. Reflect on whether or not you are following it as well as the Council of Writing Program Administrators policy on best practices to avoid plagiarism in your classroom (http://wpacouncil.org/node/9). Talk to other instructors who use a PDS if you are new to one or considering it. Read what others in your field have to say. Essentially do what you'd ask your students to do in the same situation. Research. Read. Analyze. Then form an opinion and act upon it.
Further suggested readings:
Winning Hearts and Minds in the War on Plagiarism
Copying to Prevent Copying is Fair
An Ethical Dilemma
Who Owns This Text
It's Not About Fighting Plagiarism-video
Software Catches (and Also Helps) Young Plagiarists
Understanding "Internet plagiarism"
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