Elvis Montero

Turnitin.com: An excellent idea badly implemented

An acquaintance of mine from Santo Domingo recently came to RIT to pursue his masters degree in telecommunications engineering. Just as it happened to me during my first day of class, one of his professors outlined how he would be using Turnitin.com to deter plagiarism and crosscheck all papers submitted. My new schoolmate was very concerned about this (as I had been initially) simply because plagiarism detection systems (PDS) are not used in Dominican Republic’s colleges (at least not at the moment of this writing). Thus, it was only natural for him to be a little bit wary of the tools’ effectiveness.

How do plagiarism detection systems work? Is Turnitin.com infallible? Would any PDS be able to accurately pinpoint a forged paper? What if you copy stuff from a book? Does Turnitin.com have a huge database of books or is it only online material? What if I quote someone and make the reference readily available within the paper? What would happen then? All pertinent questions indeed. It took me less than 5 minutes to fully explain to him what Turnitin.com’s methodology is. He quickly concluded that this model was gravely unfair to students. Interestingly, I had deduced the exact same thing from my research almost 6 months ago (I did a paper on the subject). Here’s why.

Turnitin.com has been a focus of controversy because of the company’s questionable manipulation of students’ intellectual property (IP). Students and parents across United States have publicly voiced their discontent with the company’s services and its impact on the educational system. This sentiment was echoed loudly in a Washington Post’s article about McLean High School’s students’ unusual revolt:

…some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to TurnItIn’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights.

The work of a student is saved automatically whenever a professor submits a paper to Turnitin.com. One would think a for-profit enterprise like iParadigms, LLC (creator and owner of Turnitin.com) would be more sensitive to intellectual property and royalties violations since the company relies heavily on IT (a field that has always been a fervent proponent of better and more stringent IP laws). Surprisingly, that does not seem to be the case. How can iParadigms blatantly charge a $2,300 fee per school and not compensate students in any way?

Students across the globe are submitting their essays –- along with their ideas, plans, opinions and pretty much everything else you could consider IP –- to a company that’s obviously storing, processing and manipulating these documents; profiting immensely along the way:

Barrie, whose privately held iParadigms company reports annual revenue of $10 million, is trying hard to woo new clients beyond its 3,500 current customers. Every college and university in the United Kingdom has already signed on for the service.

But that is not the end of it. To know that Turnitin.com is also giving out students’ work is equally shocking:

Regardless, the argument is that they are not making a copy or derivative of the original text papers. However, in my experiments, it seems that not only do they make, keep, and continually use these copies, but they also take the sharing and use and – worst of all – the distribution of MY copyrighted text completely out of my control.

What are we basically teaching our students here? That it is OK to respect IP rights of companies and commercial entities but not so for regular citizens? That anyone can do whatever he or she sees fit with your thoughts (keep, transform and sell) just because you’re not an organization?:

Finally, in today’s litigious environment where students (and universities) are being sued by the music industry for illegally using the intellectual property of others without consent and compensation, it seems very hypocritical to expect students to relinquish their intellectual properties for others to use, in this case for profit, without their consent or without the students receiving some form of compensation. This absolutely contradictory message tells the student that their rights are not as important as those of big business.

Turnitin.com’s current business model is evidently detrimental to our society as a whole. The post-Napster era has showed us that proprietary music, as well as any other manifestation of IP, should be respected and piracy in any form or shape should not be condoned. By not paying students a fee for their papers, Turnitin.com is disregarding established laws as well as every mechanism we have so carefully devised in the last 20 years to protect authors and their intellectual property.

Why am I demanding students whom have submitted their work to be remunerated? Because students are the raison d’être of the system. Turnitin.com couldn’t have prevailed in the PDS market without their work. The students’ papers are the constituents that build the company’s business model. Just as a singer/musician gets paid as soon as you buy a record through iTunes (i.e. royalties), students should also be financially rewarded as soon as their papers become part of the site’s colossal database.

As law-abiding members of our society, we should not downplay flagrant faults to our young citizens’ rights. If we are to successfully teach future generations about the value of intellectual property and its pivotal role in our never-ending path to global prosperity, Turnitin.com’s situation shall be resolved promptly.

Students ought to receive recompense or we all lose.

(DISCLOSURE: As it is implied by the title of this post, I think plagiarism detection systems are necessary. My concern here is not the what, but rather the how.)