Turn THIS in

Recently I attended a meeting with fellow writing tutors to discuss the issues surrounding plagiarism detection software. While I am highly against plagiarism and the effects that it could potentially have on my degree personally, I am not liking what I’ve been hearing about the available software.

The first problem I have revolves around just plain laziness. And I’m not talking about the laziness of the students plagiarizing. I’m talking about the laziness of school officials. It’s already a disgrace that there is practically no education on citing sources and using others’ work while writing an essay. Even at the college level I see students who have no idea what a writing style is. That’s a pretty big hole in our education system. But to see professors turn to an easy fix—the plagiarism detection software—makes me want to shake my finger in their faces. Isn’t it part of your job as a professor to analyze and evaluate my work? Is it that much more time consuming to Google phrases online that may be plagiarized? This might not be such a big issue for me if the professors using it actually knew how to use the software—but they don’t. Students are repeatedly being wrongly accused of plagiarism because professors forget that the detection software is not infallible. Whose ever had infallible technology? And where do I get mine? The worst part about these wrongly accused students are that most of the students being pegged for plagiarism are ESL or ELL students who do not fully understand how to cite their sources properly. Native English speakers have a far easier time intentionally plagiarizing and actually getting away with it. So….education, not software, should be the first priority.

The second problem concerns ethical and legal issues surrounding the software. The main reason plagiarism is taken so seriously is that it is stealing someone else’s intellectual property. So when a software detection service requires a student to give the company their essay to store in the database….what do we call that? Reverse plagiarism? Why do I care about whether other students are taking my work if a corporation ‘combating’ plagiarism has decided to keep it for themselves anyways?

What about the issue of compensation? Why are these companies getting paid for comparing essays to work written by researchers and students that were received for free?

As I see it, the software is creating more issues than it’s preventing. There have been numerous lawsuits against companies like Turnitin.com. I’ll stick with Google and my style manual. However, plagiarism and writing styles need to be emphasized and taught throughout educational institutions because it is an imperative, foundational tool for everyone.