Why It's Fun to Think and Teach About Plagiarism

The increased concern about plagiarism brought about by digital technologies and a culture where information and art comes uncited, often remixed with no attribution, brings necessary and happy (yes, there's joy in this) challenges.  The digital shifts open up opportunities in teaching, giving us new ways to talk to students about writing, researching, thinking, peer reviewing, revising, and living ethical, fair, and smart intellectual lives as an academic citizens.  This discussion will look at four aspects of this happy challenge:

1. the distinction and causes of intentional plagiarism and how it differs from the necessary and inevitable learning error; 
2. ways to make the discussion of plagiarism an invitation to, instead of a threat of expulsion from, the academic life; 
3. fun tools and sources to bring to that discussion; 
4. and the role that scaffolding assignment designs can play in making -- to quote from a plagiarism detection service's legal letter on student copyright of their own work (and we'll look at that letter) -- "the chances of plagiarism vanishingly thin."

Highly recommended: James M. Lang's Cheating Lessons from Harvard U. Press: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674724631

Community and Research: The Art of the Invitation

Recent findings from The Citation Project, a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing, reveal that students focus on the mechanics of citation and on the form for citation but not on research as inquiry calling for genuine curiosity, synthesis, and framing an argument with and from sources. Students, instead of synthesizing and marshaling sources, tend to quote them heavily, often dropping in long quotes, creating what Rebecca Howard calls patchwriting.

These findings might suggest to some that getting students to master mechanics is necessary for the prevention of plagiarism, and that avoiding plagiarism comes first. If students can master the mechanics of the research paper to start, it doesn't matter much that what they write as novices lacks a point of view,  evidence of careful reading, and other habits of mind good learning seeks to promote. In this view, as students become more expert and advance to upper level courses, they'll eventually get to the point where they have something interesting to say.

Yet we also know that plagiarism can come when students get overwhelmed by their sources, when they, in the words of Keith Hjortshoj  fall into theft and fraud because of the loss of their own voices. If they have no voice, the focus on mechanics becomes a tedious struggle, a writing from fear of error, fear of punishment.

Good research writers know how to use sources rhetorically; they choose citation mechanics to fit the purpose a source serves. So a sentence that might name a general consensus on an issue may include a parenthetical citation that list several articles which shape that consensus. The purpose of the citation is to establish context and the writer's ethos. The mechanics of the parenthetical citation fit the purpose. That, in a nutshell, is the rhetoric of citation -- matching a source's purpose to how it is placed and cited in the paper.

And so separating mechanics from argument -- X number of pages, Y number of sources, with Z number source type A, type B -- pushes students into the kind of shallow writing the Citation Project warns us about.

Research assignments that emphasize final draft mechanics heavily, sometimes in bold and all caps, that warn in dire tones about citation style guides and the wages of plagiarism, undermine the joy of research and don't allow for the teaching of the rhetoric of citation.

As Mike Palmquist describes in  The Bedford Researcher, research is about joining a conversation, an academic conversation. It's about using sources to frame a discussion, using sources to discover, using combined sources to create new insights, and most of all to join the conversation the sources and topic create.

Joining a conversation is about entering a community. And it's hard to join a community if you're invitation begins with and focuses on threats of excommunication for breaking major rules. Those rules matter, and they need to be taught and understood. But there a ways of teaching conventions that foster invitation more than warning, allow for the discovery of voice and excitement over newly engaged ideas more so than the fear of a mechanical error.

Hear are some ways to help students find their voices, and thus to use and cite sources rhetorically instead of merely mechanically correctly:

1. Have students write about an idea before they begin their research. Have them share that writing with classmates to get feedback, to hear questions, to learn of different perspectives. 
2. Teach students to weave in sources slowly, not all once, to help them avoid the last minute pile of links and/or stack of books the night before a project is due. Ask for a draft with one source considered, where that source is integrated into what students have already written. Then a new draft adds a new source. 
3. Allow mistakes. Show students how to celebrate and correct mistakes. I say celebrate because mistakes are signs of learning ambition, a stretching beyond comfort. They're necessary. They're not sources of shame, but sources of growth if treated as a learning opportunity instead of a sin.

Turnitin.com, a Pedagogic Placebo for Plagiarism

Note: I originally wrote and published this on June 5, 2001, and archived it on the Web in Technotes, a Web site I used to keep at http://bedfordstmartins.com on June 13, 2001. A few months ago, Bedford/St. Martin's reorganized the site and lost the original. I reclaimed this copy from the Way Back Machine. Since publishing the piece below in 2001, Turnitin.com has won legal cases concerning its use of student essays, and has added features which allow instructors to let students submit writing as drafts, drafts which can revised if matching text that needs citation is found.


However, I still regard relying on Turnitin.com for plagiarism as a pedagogic placebo that can do more harm than good in the classroom. This belief is reconfirmed by three things: two recent articles on Turnitin.com, and an old statement on copyright that Turnitin.com used to share with instructors. 


The articles are:
"(Moral) Hazards of Scanning for Plagiarists: Evidence from Shoplifting" by David Harrington, an economics professor, at http://davideharrington.com/?p=594. 

"NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash" by Marc Parry, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, at http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-never-to-probe-cheating-again%E2%80%94and-faces-a-backlash/32351  Parry covers the story of Panagiotis Ipeirotis, a computer science professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who wrote a detailed blogpost about what happened when he tried to pursue cheating. See also by Parry "Software Catches (and Also Helps) Young Plagiarists," which looks at WriteCheck, software Turnitin.com sells direct to students to pre-check papers on their own at http://chronicle.com/article/Escalation-in-Digital/129652/


Finally, the thing that convinces me most that Turnitin.com isn't necessary is Turnitin.com's own words, as captured in their statement on copyright, which they used to distribute to instructors who were concerned about how students papers are used in their database of submitted papers. You'll see from the quoted portion of the statement here http://bedfordstmartins.com/catalog/static/bsm/technotes/workshops/plagiarism.htm, that even Turnitin believes that if one teaches writing and research using standard writing process and good research teaching strategies that the chances of plagiarism are "vanishingly thin." So they admit that good teaching makes their product unneeded. I agree.

Turnitin.com, a Pedagogic Placebo for Plagiarism

If you attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Denver this past March, you may have noticed numerous flyers for a Web-based plagiarism detection service called Turnitin.com. If you didn't attend the conference, you most likely have seen them referenced in a sidebar--along with other plagiarism detection Web businesses--in one of the recent articles from the flurry of news coverage about the incident at the University of Virginia where 122 students are being investigated for possible plagiarism. In that story, a physics professor, Louis A. Bloomfield, wrote a small program that compared student papers for matching phrases, and found 60 matches (double that and add 2, and you see why there's 122 students being investigated) that were more than coincidental-in some cases papers were almost exact duplicates.
In any event, if you haven't heard about Turnitin.com--or a service like them--through the press or at a conference or campus mailing, you likely will soon, perhaps from a colleague or a teacher in another department or from one of your campus deans. These folk might come to you because they know you teach writing, most likely first year composition, a course that traditionally includes a research paper and therefore addresses plagiarism. And they might also want your view in particular because you're a teacher, writing center leader, or writing program administrator familiar with online learning strategies and the Internet.
Given the likelihood that many of us will be asked to advise and comment on Turnitin.com, I thought it would be useful to visit the site and devote a couple of Teaching with Technology Tips to Turnitin.com in particular and to plagiarism in general. This week, I'll focus primarily on Turnitin.com, offering a review of the site and service based on my own visits to the site; in a later Teaching Tip, I'll take a broader look at plagiarism and how computer technology offers opportunities for better understanding and teaching it.

What is Turnitin.com?

Turnitin.com was originally founded by John Barrie -- a neurobiology graduate student -- as Plagiarism.org, which still exists as a marketing arm of Turnitin.com. The site's FAQ (http://www.plagiarism.org/faq.html) explains their anti-plagiarism technology, detailing that it's "a new technology called document source analysis, which uses a set of powerful algorithms to make a digital 'fingerprint' of any text document and then compare it against millions of other sources on the Internet." They compiled their database by "continually cataloging and indexing online academic works with automated web robots" focusing on online paper mills and archiving papers from participating courses.
Sounds impressive, right? This is a fancy way of saying that they compare one text (a student's) to others in their database or on the Web. 

But here's the kicker, according to a 1999 article in Salon: the comparisons don't always work so well. In "The Web's Plagiarism Police," (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/14/plagiarism/), Andy Dehnart writes:

Plagiarism.org's site insists that "only cases of gross plagiarism are flagged. This means that papers using some identical quotes or papers written on similar topics will NEVER be flagged as unoriginal." But that wasn't exactly my experience. I put a friend's research paper in the system as well, and it found five phrases that matched other sources found on the Net. The report said the "paper probably contains plagiarized material from the given manuscript." But a quick check showed that the indicted sentences were all legitimate excerpts, appearing within quotation marks and citing sources. Again, the service came across like a hanging judge.

Plagiarism.org's Barrie -- a neurobiology graduate student at UC-Berkeley -- acknowledges that the service fails to properly differentiate between quoted materials and original writing.

This, of course, means anyone who trusts Turnitin.com blindly, risks being made the fool, and if they charge a student with plagiarism without careful double-checking, they can get into administrative hot water. For adjuncts especially, who are more likely not to be renewed if their teaching is questioned, relying on Turnitin.com when it can't read or judge, is dangerous. The software merely compares. It is to teaching students how to write well with sources what a spell checker is to proof reading. However, the whole rhetorical pitch and presentation of the site, the reports it makes on student papers, as Dehnart notes in his Salon piece, presents its findings as if plagiarism is almost certain.

Detection as Placebo

If you look at the Turnitin.com Web site, its rhetorical appeals are twofold: to teachers' fear of plagiarism ("Almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once," "33% admit to using electronic technologies to cheat regularly"; and to teachers' indignation at the act ("our goal is to return integrity to higher education"). The alarmist rhetoric is shrill, like those ads for home burglar alarms that feature a menacing man with a crowbar outside the windows as mom tucks her daughter into bed while dad's away on a trip. It plays to worst fears in the worst way.
 
Why the worst way? Turnitin.com doesn't distinguish between cheating--intentionally cutting and pasting in elements from other electronic documents--from the inevitable mistakes in paraphrasing, summarizing, file management, note taking and so on. Cheating is wrong and should be punished. Mistakes in using and citing sources -- which can be technical, mechanical, rhetorical, and evaluative -- are in fact a necessary part of learning how to write with and from sources. To automatically and as default position equate these mistakes with fraud and cheating undermines learning. Novice writers need to be able to make and correct mistakes, in much the same way an athlete makes mistakes in practice, or in a game, and then practices some more to get it right. Turnitin.com doesn't convey any patience or make any distinctions in this regard. And thus it makes the challenging of addressing plagiarism harder.
 
The service is not about teaching, it's about catching. In that, it's a pedagogic placebo. And teaching students how to wisely use others ideas--how to distinguish when and why to cite a source, how to introduce them into conventions for doing so--is hard enough with adding in the threat of constant surveillance, which Turnitin offers in the guise of peer review. 

Turnitin.com offers archiving and 'peer review' services that invite instructors to have students post all their work on the site, under the argument that doing so will stop students from cheating because they'll know that every time they upload a paper it will be checked (and also copied and made part of the Turnitin.com database in case some future student uses the same paper). But this approach is akin to learning how to drive for the first time by always being tailed by a state trooper.

It assumes the worst about students and the worst about teachers. It assumes students have no honor and need always to be watched and followed electronically, a big brother welcome to academic traditions. It assumes teachers are too beleagured and inept to design classroom assignments and practices that teach students how to write responsibly. Much of what Turnitin.com proposes to detect can be avoided by careful assignment planning and teaching (a subject that will be covered in the next Teaching Tip), by paying better attention early on to students and the work they do.

But even in the best of all pedagogical circumstances, there will be times when students do cheat, when they do go beyond making mistakes in learning how to write with sources and cross over into deliberate fraud. When this happens, teachers do in fact need to try to find the originating source, and do need to challenge their students on authenticity of their work. It's at this point, when the need to do some digging is upon them, that even the most concientious teacher might be tempted to use Turnitin.com, or a service like it.

Before taking that step, however, a savvy teacher can spend a bit of time on a good search engine trying subject searches, and if a student took something from the Internet, chances are pretty good you'll find it there. But sometimes that doesn't work. And so, the next logical step might be to use something like Turnitin.com, as a last ditch attempt to find the smoking gun.
But I wouldn't even then. I simply think Turnitin.com is unethical. I think using it to ferret out plagiarism--an infraction against intellectual property--is unethical because Turnitin.com co-opts students' intellectual property in order to sell its service.

Turnitin.com keeps a copy of every paper submitted and adds it to their database. Students have no choice in the matter; if a professor submits a student's paper for a check, it's archived -- essentially inhouse-published -- for future use by the Turnitin.com database. The Turnitin.com privacy policy and user agreement say nothing on this that I could find. And that in itself is problematic in my view.

I'm troubled by this co-option of student writing on human subject grounds. Most universities have protocols for getting permission to study humans, whether medically, chemically, or socially (i.e. interviewing, surveying, ethnographies and so on). Under these protocols, researchers must submit plans for how they will collect and use student works, and must work out permission to do so. As a teacher and textbook author -- and now as someone who works for a publisher -- I would never use students work in a book, at a conference, or in any professional capacity without students' written permission, which permission must be freely given and not co-erced as a condition of the course. 

With Turnitin.com, students' work is captured and held without their permission. This goes against the grain of most writing pedagogy, which premises that students are 'authors' and 'authorities' and owners of their own work (coincidentally, the assumption used to establish copyright). It also goes against the grain of one's right to their intellectual property that Turnitin.com, in its pursuit of plagiarists, seeks to uphold. So using Turnitin.com presents students with a double standard. 

If one uses Turnitin.com, they say to students something like this:

Plagiarism is wrong because it's the theft of another person's intellectual property. Yet we don't trust you to follow that ethos, so we're going to violate it ourselves to save you from your own perfidity. We're going to take your property--your writing--and check it here, in this place that will keep a copy of your work whether you give permission for this or not. Sorry, it won't be just your property any more, it will also belong to Turnitin.com's database.

And why, ultimately does Turnitin.com do this? 

For two reasons. One is a pedagogical misunderstanding, the other is based on a business plan. 

Pedagogically, their underlying assumption is that the student will cheat, or will let his or her paper be used for cheating, or that someone will take it without permission and cheat from it. The underlying assumption is one of guilt. But they also do it so they can boast at their Web site and in their advertisements and come-on's to colleges and school districts how comprehensive their database is.

Their business plan is best examined in the May issue of Perspectives Online, the newsletter of the American Historical Association. There, Kate Masur quotes John Barrie, founder of Turnitin.com, as saying that his company will "become the next generation's spell checker . . . There will be no room for anybody else, not even a Microsoft, to provide a similar type of service because we will have the database." 

That's just wrong. Gathering the intellectual property of students for profit, without their permission, and assuming they'll cheat is unfair. The whole Turnitin.com approach, an approach other Web-based detection services follow, is the wrong way to teach students about plagiarism, copyright, and intellectual property.

bedfordstmartins.com/technotes

(Emailed 6/5/01; Archived on the Web 6/13/01)

Citation: Get Over It by Kirk Schick

At http://chronicle.com/article/Citation-Obsession-Get-Over/129575/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en, Kirk Schick pens a good piece on how faculty are increasingly obsessing over the mechanics of citation at the expense of students having anything to say. He recommends waiting until after the first year to start teaching academic citation mechanics and instead to use informal and journalism citation practices.

Sources are noted and credited, but the greater emphasis is on voice, what a writer needs to say, and using sources well. This aligns to the paper I gave at CCCC in April 2011, which Barbara Fister summarizes here:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library_babel_fish/why_the_research_paper_isn_t_working

Why Do Students Intentionally Plagiarize?

We all know students will make mistakes in source handling and integration. They might forget to include quotes, or might believe that they do not need to cite something that requires citation. They might mishandle the distinction between summarizing and paraphrasing. Poor note-taking might lead to incorrect or incomplete citation.

The list of mistakes is long, but happily teachable.

But why do some students deliberately cheat? What makes them choose to fake a source, or hide quotation marks?

Take a moment and make a list, write down why you think students do this.

Then create another list: how does the first list and/or catching an intentional plagiarist make you feel as an instructor?

Stuff I Like to Use in Every Course

What is Plagiarism?

One of those terms whose definition seems, ironically enough, to be plagiarized from time to time. Or is it plagiarized? Why isn't it?

Cheating is Easy
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=free+term+papers, but let us look and see how it can be made both harder to do, and not worth doing, all in the context of helping students use the Internet and WWW better for the writing and learning they need to do.

Try Googling your assignment. Go to Google or another search engine, and put in keywords from your writing assignment. See what comes up. Do you need to revise the assignment to make it less plagiarable?

Turn Papermills to Your Advantage
Since these sites exist, let students know that you know about them. Use them in your teaching. For example, you can go to Schoolsucks.com
(http://schoolsucks.com/portal/modules.php?name=searchmain) and find student papers and use them in class for all sorts of reasons: to teach peer review, for editing practice, as imperfect models.



How Student Papers Sometimes Get Written

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.htmlThe site's a hoot, and it's funny. And it's also a useful teaching tool, worth showing in class if you can do it, or sending students to look at and write about it for a class discussion on doing one's own
work.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2059540/leads to "Adventures in Cheating," by Seth Stevenson, a piece that samples term paper mills, and finds --no surprise-- that you get what you pay for (and even that ain't much). I wrote a response to this piece, which again, I find useful for teaching, that began, "Essentially, the free papers stink, and they're recycled. That is, free papermill sites often carry copies of the same papers." Rest of the note is here: http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=2538524&.

Turnitin's statement on copyright

About this letter

This letter is old, from 2001, and Turnitin.com has changed as a company -- most significantly with new ownership. But also since its arrival in 1997, its product's evolved, its approach to teaching about plagiarism is more sophisticated, it supports best practices that many teachers follow and use successfully.

Still, this letter has value because it points to a fundamental truth: that with course and writing assignment design, which the workshops I do focus on, Turntin.com really isn't necessary. See the final paragraph.

Context for Letter

In 2001, a student at a college which subscribes to Turnitin.com put a copyright statement on his essay, saying that his work couldn't be uploaded to any WWW site and archived. This meant that it couldn't be submitted to Turnitin.com (or a service such as Plagiserve.com, a free alternative to Turnitin.com that also archives submitted papers), which archives papers and adds them to the database that submissions are checked against.

The college checked with their lawyers, and with Turnitin.com on what to do if a student puts a copyright on their own work expressly forbidding their paper to be co-opted by a for profit service such as Turnitin.com. Below is Turnitin.com's reply to the matter of student copyright (They don't think much of it.).

Also, here's an excerpt from the writing center director at the college where this happened, describing what happened on the college end:

I also contacted our general counsel (the chancellor's legal team) for their thoughts. The wording in our institutional documents does not seem to compel students to give papers to this type of service, although it says that by enrolling, students give "limited rights for the instructor to mark on, grade, and retain" papers and to do whatever "as required by the process of instruction." Their final word was, let the student off the hook and don't submit the paper to the database. Now the provost wonders if this idea will catch on, effectively making his $4,000 investment a dud. I don't think this issue is going away.

Turnitin.com's reply to the issue:

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Wedlake [mailto:pwedlake@iparadigms.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 5:55 PM
Subject: Legal issues regarding Turnitin.com


I've attached our Registration Agreement that outlines some of the issues we
discussed yesterday. I have also attached our Usage Agreement and Privacy
Pledge.

Please contact legal@iparadigms.com if you need further assistance.

Below is our standard statement regarding the Copyright Issue:

We have spent considerable time and expense researching this issue.  The
consistent opinion of our attorneys, plus those of the several schools that
have looked into it, including the University of California, is that fair
use does in fact allow us to store the student's papers.  Here is a summary
of the reasoning:

We believe that use of the student's paper would be deemed fair because
rather than constituting infringement, the use prevents infringement of that
paper from occurring.  The student's paper is only being used to catch
someone who might have stolen from it.  That's the primary purpose of the
use and so it would likely be accorded even more deference than other
recognized purposes of fair use such as education, commentary and research
because its promotion of the underlying goal of the copyright statute, i.e.,
to promote creativity, is higher.

Most major recent fair use cases have identified "transformative use" as the
key question in fair use analysis.  Transformative use means that the new
work is being used for a different purpose than the old work.  In this case,
transformative use is present because the instructor is not using the paper
for its original purpose, i.e., turning an assignment in, research into a
topic, but is making a new use of the paper, i.e., checking for
infringement.

Of the four fair use factors, effect on the market for the work is generally
considered the most important.  In this case, the instructor's use of the
student paper isn't affecting any reasonably likely market because it's not
reasonable to assume that individual students could start licensing papers
to individual teachers for this purpose.

Thus, although the issues are complicated, we feel confident that the use of
Student papers in our system does constitute fair use.  That being said, a
few precautions can greatly simplify the relationship between student,
institution and Turnitin.com.

Informing students of the use of the system in each course syllabus using
the product is the most important tool.  This is the stop sign that prevents
most of the plagiarism in the first place (which should be the goal), and it
also insures that students are agreeing to take that course with the
provision that their papers may be submitted to our system.

Having students submit their work, rather than instructors submitting it,
adds one more level of consent on the part of the student, as nothing is
done without the student's knowledge.  We do not feel that this is required
to meet the requirements of fair use, but it certainly removes any
ambiguity.

Finally, offering the students an off-line alternative makes their consent
absolutely clear.  For instance, as an alternative, the student could be
required to turn in a photocopy of the first page of all reference sources
used, an annotated bibliography, and a one page paper reflecting on their
research methodology.  Such an option would be unlikely to be chosen by any
students, but if they did choose it, the chances of plagiarism would also be
vanishingly thin.


Best regards,

Paul Wedlake
Director of Sales
iParadigms, LLC., developers of Turnitin.com/Plagiarism.org
1624 Franklin St., Suite 818
Oakland, CA 94612
Ph: 510-287-9720 ext. 223
Fax: 510-444-1952
URL1: www.turnitin.com
URL2: www.plagiarism.org
URL3: www.iparadigms.com