Apparently a great deal of attention is swirling around plagiarism detection sites, such as Turn it in, which to be fair, I only heard of about five minutes ago. Particularly in Canada, students are protesting the culture of mistrust surrounding use of this product. It has been banned at a few universities and is being heavily protested at others.

One of the big objections, it seems, is students’ papers get added to the database as they are scanned. This is an interesting assumption about intellectual property rights, as shouldn’t the student retain the rights to say who can use their intellectual property and for what purpose? This is no small point.

Further, I would think that most instructors in a specific discipline can get a sense very quickly of which students are representing their own words, and which are cheating word for word. Particular passages may strike the instructor as out of the range of the students grasp of vocabulary and grammar, and a quick google search can verify whether the thought is unique. Of course, this does put more burden on the instructor, but wouldn’t scanning every student document also do so?

And who decided these particular plagiarism guidelines? “Turn it in” identifies passages of eight words or more that match another work’s passage. Eight generic words together could naturally occur throughout papers and really not be indicative of plagiarism. Or, conversely, less than eight words, even just three or four could be a phrase coined by another writer that needs to be referenced, or a concept that the writer cannot take credit for. These are even more important than just the order of words someone has chosen.

More to the point, will all faculty be open to having their own work scanned accordingly? The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran a piece about academic plagiarism about a year ago. One writer who found his work plagiarized had a great deal of trouble getting any action to happen regarding the violation of his intellectual property:

He immediately contacted the International Studies Association, since the original article had appeared in one of its journals. Officials there said he should go to Blackwell Publishing, the company that produces the journal.

The runaround continued. Blackwell told him that the company stays out of such disputes. He was advised to go to a professional organization and get a finding of plagiarism. So he went back to the International Studies Association. “They were genuinely sympathetic,” he says. “But they said, ‘We don’t want to get into judging issues of plagiarism.’”-Four Academic Plagiarists You’ve Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There?

The article explains that eventually action was taken against the plagiarizer, but he was not fired.

How about government leaders? (See British government plagiarism- here links to MERIA article and news about the plagiarism, the actual dossier link is, surprisingly, not current). Tony Blair is still Prime Minister, last I checked.

I was not really against checking students’ work for plagiarism until I thought about the high standards we hold for their work and the high consequence of expulsion they face. In contrast, acts of plagiarism in the professional world are punished as little more than slaps on the wrist. Perhaps we should start from the top down, if professionals are willing to subject their own work to “turn it in,” and add it to the “turn it in” online database, then we can work our way down to student papers. Given that “turn it in” identifies plagiarism as eight words in a row, there would be a whole lot less journal articles with sentences like: “we need to engage learners in a community of practice” or “at-risk children don’t benefit from No Child Left Behind,” etc. etc.