Fighting Plagiarism, Schools Go High-Tech

What makes Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 unusual is not the fact that she plagiarized passages from another author’s work—it’s the fact that she got caught.

Well, that and the fact that she scored a six-figure book contract.

According to the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, 40 percent of college students admit to “cut-and-paste plagiarism.”

If several rounds of editors at Viswanathan’s publishing house, Little, Brown, couldn’t weed the words of other writers from the sophomore’s novel before it went to press, how can professors and teaching fellows at Harvard expect to police plagiarism in coursework?

An Oakland, Calif.-based software company says it has a solution.

The company’s anti-plagiarism system, TurnItIn, scans student papers for similarities with previous work.

At universities that subscribe to TurnItIn, professors can submit student papers to the company’s website—and those papers remain in the TurnItIn database forever.

TurnItIn then compares the submissions to all the other papers in its database. Within seconds, it spits back a detailed report on any matches.

Georgetown University, the University of California-Los Angeles, and the United States Military Academy at West Point are all among the clients that TurnItIn now lists.

Will Harvard hop on the bandwagon?

Not anytime soon, say administrators and instructors here.

TURNING THE TABLES

The Internet makes it easier for students to lift passages from other sources. But it also makes it easier to catch the copiers.

The creator and chief executive of TurnItIn, John Barrie, said his software is an indispensable tool.

“All the other methods, such as proctors and honor codes, are the status quo. That is what people have been trying to do and they have failed. This is the only technology that works to stop student plagiarism,” said Barrie, who started TurnItIn in 1996.

Barrie added that Harvard would benefit from TurnItIn. “Especially at schools like Harvard, honest students are being out-competed by students not doing their work. When you hear the administration say plagiarism is under control and that the faculty can spot it, it is an enormous disservice to the majority of students working hard to make the grade,” he said.

If Harvard subscribes to Barrie’s system—which can cost $1,000 to $10,000 per campus—it wouldn’t be the first time that an instructor here had used the Internet to catch cheaters.

In 2002, a visiting professor, Benjamin O. Fordham, used a somewhat similar program, Eve2, to prevent plagiarism in his course, Government 1790, “American Foreign Policy.”

But that doesn’t mean the rest of Harvard is ready to follow Fordham’s lead,

TurnItDown

Gordon Harvey, the associate director of expository writing and author of the citation guide “Writing With Sources,” does not believe that Harvard will need TurnItIn anytime soon.

According to Harvey, “When plagiarism does occur in Expos, it’s usually pretty easy to spot from sudden shifts in style or topic, and usually easy enough to check out by ‘Googling.’ I suppose this is one reason why we haven’t considered using a program like TurnItIn.”

And the secretary of Harvard College’s Administrative Board, John L. Ellison, does not believe that TurnItIn is the right solution to the issue of plagiarism in academic institutions.

“I think educating students on time management, and also on how to ask for extensions and accommodations, is far better than trying to catch them [plagiarizing]. I would prefer that we had no examples of plagiarism and that, of course, is our goal.”

And the co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Jonathan L. Zittrain, wrote in an e-mail that “trying to catch [plagiarism] mechanically through websites like TurnItIn.com is demeaning to everyone involved.”

“We should see plagiarism as a signal of the overall health of academia and act to solve the problem fundamentally,” he added.

A HOYA HURRAH

On the other hand, the student-faculty Honor Council at Georgetown University, which has been using TurnItIn on a trial basis since the spring semester of 2002, gives a thumbs up to the software.

The graduate assistant to the Honor Council, Kyle Stedman, described the program as an “excellent deterrent” to plagiarism, adding that the software can alert students to less obvious instances of plagiarism.

“Many students who plagiarize don’t realize they are doing anything wrong. In those cases, this kind of software can be an important learning tool that can help them open their eyes to the realities of intellectual rights in the relatively safe environment of college,” he said.

Students on the Honor Council do not believe that the use of TurnItIn creates an environment of distrust, although they caution that professors should make a point of informing their students that their papers will be checked by the software.

“The student should not feel like the professor is out to catch him or her, because one is expected to do one’s own work,” said Caitlin P. McMullen, a senior at Georgetown and an Honor Council member. “If the student has done nothing wrong, he or she should not fear the use of the program,”

Catherine Clancy, another Honor Council member, said that the software would not be as useful without the school’s proactive approach to preventing plagiarism, which requires the completion of an online tutorial on academic integrity.

COPYRIGHT, COPY-WRONG

Some students at other campuses have expressed concern that TurnItIn might compromise their intellectual property rights because it stores papers in its database permanently.

And when the University of California-Berkeley balked at joining TurnItIn in 2002, the school’s assistant chancellor for legal affairs, Mike R. Smith, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the issue of students’ intellectual property rights was “one of the trouble spots for us in moving ahead with this proposal.”

But thousands of schools have joined TurnItIn despite the intellectual property concerns expressed by Berkeley and others.

And Zittrain, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, does not think that TurnItIn infringes on intellectual property rights because, as he wrote in an e-mail, “the essays won’t be read by anyone and will just be retained to see if someone *else* cribs that student’s essay.”

WESTSIDE STORY

Westside High School in Omaha, Neb., is already a TurnItIn subscriber. Westside alumna Jillian J. Goodman ’09 thinks that her new school should follow her old school’s lead.

“Given that TFs and professors receive such a huge volume of student compositions, I think that TurnItIn.com will be incredibly useful. Its success, though, depends on what they do with the results.”

“It’s a shame that the pursuit of academic honesty has turned into an inquisition, but TurnItIn.com helps to make sure that at least all work is treated the same way,” Goodman wrote in an e-mail. “Or rather,” she added, “that all work is subject to the same scrutiny, because it’s still up the professor to decide how to proceed if or when the program identifies a problem.”

At Westside, according to Goodman, “all the teachers loved it, because it meant that they were able to read for quality and let the computer read for honesty.”

And with the world wading through a Harvard student’s work to read for honesty, that might bring some a sigh of relief.