This Anti-Plagiarism Defense by Universities Goes Too Far
From Techdirt (links within excerpt are to prior Techdirt posts) — Students are Uuset that schools are uploading papers to a gigantic database. I didn’t know this, and I don’t think it’s right:
It’s been nearly four years since we wrote about students and parents being upset that online services that check student homework for plagiarism were also uploading and storing a copy of every paper they checked. It got to the point, earlier this year, that at least one university banned the use of Turnitin, one of the most popular services in this field. It seems that the student rebellion against such tools is growing, as many more students are questioning the legality of such tools, and asking their schools to stop using them. They’re not just upset about the uploads, but about the assumption of guilt.
My big problem is the presumption that a student’s term papers essentially become de facto university property. Last Friday’s Washington Post article noted the objection that adding papers to Turnitin’s 22-million paper database violates intellectual property rights. I suppose the universities could make giving up those rights a condition of enrollment, but I think it’s safe to say almost none of them have. At a minimum, I would think that paper authors ought to have the right to have their papers pulled from Turnitin’s database, but I’ll bet they don’t. It would be interesting to see what would happen if a student put conditions on a paper he or she turned in on time (e.g., “This paper has been turned in on time complies with all of the instructor’s requirements. You cannot review the paper until you acknowledge that although you have my permission to test this paper for plagiarism, you will not add it to any software database, and you will destroy this paper after you issue my grade for this class.”)
I would also have to think that no matter how good the software is, the chances of false positives and incorrectly ruined reputations get unacceptably high in a database of tens of millions of papers.
