Professors, staff continue to support use of Turnitin

Anti-plagiarism program used by 15 percent of full and part-time faculty

March 26, 2007 —

Roughly 85-90 professors and teachers at SVSU - about 15 percent of the faculty - use the online plagiarism deterrent Turnitin.com in their classrooms, according to Diane Boehm, the site's license administrator at the University.

Turnitin.com creates Originality Reports and Originality Scores for the writing that students submit. The site shows where information is from, how much there is, and gives access to actual sources. From here, professors can verify papers for plagiarism.

Boehm thinks it is a helpful teaching tool.

"Many faculty use it as a teaching device, rather than a policing strategy," Boehm said. "In my classes, for instance, students submit their own drafts to Turnitin, to check that they have cited every source appropriately and to review how well they have synthesized information. Students can then use their Originality Report to guide their revising before they submit a paper."

However, some have wondered who keeps the rights to the work once it's submitted - the students, or the site. According to Finkbeiner Endowed Chair in Ethics Francis Dane, the student retains the copyright to their work. He said students would have to sign a form to formally transfer copyrights to the site. Dane refers to the process as giving distribution permission, rather than actually sharing the copyrights.

Turnitin's Web site indicates that the company's policies comply with existing U.S. and international law, and that several legal teams have reviewed and approved of its terms of use agreement and copyright policy.

Despite this, some students have protested the use of the service. The most well-known of these incidents involved students at McLean High School in Fairfox County, Virginia, who caught the attention of the Washington Post and prompted a debate on campuses across the country.

SVSU teachers and professors are required to include the use of Turnitin.com in course syllabi.

"Turnitin has official language that we put into our syllabi, basically giving us permission to do exactly that," Dane said.

Associate Professor of Philsophy Jeff Koperski's syllabus explicitly states that students will be required to use Turnitin.com. He says that if his students are opposed to it, they can drop the class.

"I use it in every class," he said. "Finding good paper topics can be difficult, so when I get one I tend to use it again. The downside is that some students are tempted to recycle papers as their own. I've had Turnitin catch some of these in the past since all the old papers are in their database. It also keeps students from simply cutting and pasting work found on the internet."

Boehm added that the program works toward a higher level of academic integrity at SVSU.

"Faculty see it as a way to support the honor code developed last year by Student Association," she said.

The site is used in almost every program on campus, including the Colleges of Science, Engineering, and Technology, and Arts and Behavioral Sciences.

"I find it incredibly useful," Dane said. "It really lays it out for the student exactly."