Students petition against Turnitin

A colleague of mine recently directed my attention to this article in the Washington Post. Over 1100 students at a Virginia high school have petitioned school officials to stop using Turnitin, for they claim that the online anti-plagiarism service violates their intellectual property rights. In addition to violating their rights, students say that use of the service implies guilt and that the subscription fees paid to Turnitin could be better spent.

Much of the debate over Turnitin has centered on the intellectual property rights of students and the implication of assumed guilt that allegedly accompanies the use of the service, but little has been said, to my knowledge, about the allocation of school funds to subscribe to Turnitin. I wish to address that topic here.

The Washington Post reports the following: "members of the Committee for Students' Rights want the school to allow students to opt out. In an interview at a Starbucks near the campus, they said that they can learn about plagiarism directly from teachers and that there are other ways to catch cheaters. They also said fees paid to Turnitin would be better spent on other educational matters." Despite contrary statements by teachers and school officials, students continue to focus on the "gotcha" aspects of Turnitin. They ignore the pedagogical potential of the online service. If they would take a moment to consider the ways that Turnitin might help them learn proper citation and avoid plagiairism, then they would likely not see Turnitin as a threat but as a safety precaution or even a friend.

The argument that subscription fees could be "better spend on other educational matters" loses much of its force when the pedagogical potential of Turnitin takes center stage. When used as a pedagogical tool, Turnitin lets students find and fix instances of accidental (or intentional) plagiarism. It identifies those passages where students did not properly paraphrase or cite the work of others and gives them an opportunity to revise those portions before "officially" turning in their work to teachers. To be sure, this process is much different than traditional lecture-based methods of teaching and learning about source attribution; it's more student-centered. And most of the scholarship about the teaching of writing in the last forty years have favored the self-directed and learn-through-practice methods of teaching composition. So why should learning to paraphrase and cite sources be excluded from these proven methods of teaching writing when they are, themselves, an essential part of writing and learning to write? The answer is simple: they shouldn't.

When viewed through a pedagogical lens, it seems that 80 cents per student is not a lot of money to spend on something that effectively teaches students to cite sources. Through my own experiences as a teacher of writing, Turnitin helps students avoid plagiarism much better than any lecture on the topic. And it frees up a lot of classroom time to talk about other writerly issues and strategies.