http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/080118/odds/odd_plagiarism_dc I found this article interesting because a few years ago at a university in Halifax, Nova Scotia the student body voted against a system that would catch plagiarism. The way it worked was that a part of any essay that they handed in would end up in a database. the prof would be able to check any essays handed in against this database to see if the essay was original work. The reason that the students were able to get away with voting against this system was that they argued that copying a part of their essay and putting it in a database violated their own copyright on their essay. and if they did not give permission to copy it, that the teachers were not allowed to. I do agree that if someone does not want something that they made reproduced, that it should not be. But at the same time, because this was for educational reasons, I think that it should be allowed and enforced to make sure that students are in fact handing in their own work and not getting a good grade based on someone else's work. What do you think?
all of our work at uni was checked for plagiarism with their own software. as far as i am aware, after they demonstrated its effectiveness to us in our first year, nobody tried copying each other again. our uni took our copyright very seriously, however. i don't think anything was stored in a database. considering it was a computer science course and most assignments were code-based, i think they just checked all current submissions for any similarities.
Yeah same. The difference is however I think at uni if you get caught plagiarising a lot of the unis will simply kick you off your course, which I'm guessing is not such a problem for A-level / 6th form students The thing is... the difference between plagiarism and valid quoting / referencing is very small; as long as you don't plagiarise an entire essay, it's perfectly acceptable to use choice quotes from another source for the sake of argument, as long as you reference them correctly and use them to prove / disprove a point you're making yourself.
or they could submit all the work into here and it will scan against all papers in there database and give a score on how much is copyed, at tech its set up in such a way that we can check ourselves and fix up anything if it comes out badly
ugh... don't get me started with that website, it said once that over 50% of my paper was copied once, when it wasn't. it took FOREVER to prove to the teacher it wasn't plagiarized.
Oh my my, turnitin, we were the test group at college for this system when i was there. We hated it, couldn't open it again to find out what the leacture had commented on. I much prefer to hand my work in on PAPER, and allow the leacture to mark it using a PEN, that was and still is a better system. Sam
Aren't there exceptions in copyright law that allow reproductions for educational use? Perhaps Canadian copyright law varies slightly from US copyright law in this regard. -monkey
Turnitin is an evil thing. And not because it was wrongly flagging my work as plagiarized (I write my own papers, thanks), but because they infringe your copyright. And the staff at the school take the 'suck it up or you fail' approach. Uncool.
this is the part that I dont understand. sure fine, you have a copyright on your material. but its not like they take your paper and sell it or make any other kind of gain off of it. wouldn't you rahter know that after you put in your hard work, someone else isn't just making a copy of someone else's hard work and getting a good grade for doing nothing?
I can remember in college, I was working on some work based around telephony / wide area networks. The lecturer took one look at it and accused me of plagiarism. So I told him to run it through the plagiarism checker, and then check sections against a search engine of his choice. Right in front of me. If there was ever a time I had a smug look on my face, that was it. (Incidentally, it was my own work, but when doing project work, I used to type like a textbook.) I don't understand the people who do cheat, and even less so if they make no attempt to dress it up. If they did get a qualification by cheating, then they would be screwed when it came to getting a job that involved applying the knowledge that would have been gained in the course.
Have to agree with not understanding plagarism. Aparently one student at my uni turned in a paper chock full of hyperlinks to various pages that had been linked to from his plagarised sites. Noob. Myself, I'm unsure about how I feel regarding anti-plagarism tech. Not that it matters, my recent exams and papers will all have been submitted to one service or another. There's nothing I can do about it or anything. I was quite pleased with how they handled a plagarism suspicion against me when I started there and turned in my first essay though - when discussing the essay with me they just spent about 80% of the time talking about how bad plagarism was, how it was checked for, and about all the nasty things that could happen to you if you were caught doing it. So they made it obvious they thought I was doing it, but didn't flat out accuse me. Seems like the smartest and least offensive way. Still, much like in CSS you get accused of hacking if you're consistantly at the top of the leaderboard, I guess in education you'll get the odd accusation of plagarism if you're consistantly getting A marks. C'est la vie
Their entire service is based off of using my work. That's how having a database of submitted papers works.
This is actually a very good point. If a service is making money from comparing students papers against students papers, don't the students, as the people who worked to make the material they use to compare new stuff against, deserve some recompense?
Opt-out programs should be put in place so that students who do not wish to have their work used for plagiarism checks can have their way. I'm sure there are tons of students willing to waive their right to protect their work (whatever "protect" means to them, anyways)
That's exactly why I was giving the administration hell over using the service. They put me in a situation of 'give up your publishing rights or you fail the class', using the whole guilty by disassociation thought process (if you didn't plagiarize the paper, what's your problem with using the service? aka if you've got nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?). I no longer go to that school. Not for this reason entirely, though it was a small contributing factor.
Possibly, or possibly not. It really comes down to how you define fair use, and whether or not your legal team can beat the opposing team. There was a case recently in which a student put a copyright notice on his paper. The notice expressly forbade his paper to be co-opted by a for-profit service such as Turnitin.com. The professor consulted the university's legal counsel and the lawyer's advice was, let the student go and don't upload the paper. Turnitin.com, however, held a different view: This is copied from an e-mail that Paul sent to the university. I found it here. -monkey
No, the student's paper is being used to make money. The fact that it's being used to prevent copyright breach is just a secondary fact to the company, since a companies ultimate primary goal is always profit. Reading that email, which is basicly lies, makes me dislike the idea of these companies even more. If all the orgs that did this service were not for profit, or were publicly run I wouldn't mind. But I'm not sure I like the idea of private companies doing this.
That's the basic argument used by student unions all over the country, both at the high school and college level. It looks like the power is with the students in this battle, because just about all of the decisions have favored the students' rights. The article does mention a free alternative, Plagiserve.com. -monkey
