Teach your children well
The Washington Post had a story last week describing a rise in student resentment against the growing usage of automated plagiarism checking by companies like California-based Turnitin.
For a fee, Turnitin is given copies of papers that students do and add them to their 22 million paper database. Presumably they use text-matching heuristics to query for semantically similar or at a minimum, exactly copied reports.
The protests stem from the way that the technology works. Many students feel that the schools have no right to use their (the students) intellectual property in that way.
I agree.
I have several problems with this system, although as a some-time professor, I can appreciate the need. I do not like the idea that these papers find a permanent digital home. Someday they might prove embarassing to the student writers (and please don't tell me about computer security--there is no such thing).
I also wonder what we're teaching. Why is America so hell-bent on bringing back the dunking chair? There seems to be an overreaching emphasis on punishing people who get over on the system, whether they're terrorists, scofflaws or in this case, our own children. Isn't it better to, as CSN&Y put it so many years ago -- "teach our children well"? A compulsive plagiarizer will almost certainly get caught before their four years are up. This kind of technology will be most effective at catching the one-time cheat or maybe stopping the old fraternity practice of maintaining a file cabinet of proven papers, sorted by subject and letter grade received ("you want a paper on the French Revolution? $100 for an 'A', $35 for a 'B').
America has a bad habit of using extraordinarily expensive technology to stop outlying cases of non-problems. It's like our institutional administrators can't stand the thought of even a single student getting away with copying a paper. In these days of the "No Child's Behind Left Behind" Act and the steadily declining funding of our educational system, we can no longer afford to indulge the neuroses of our self-righteous bureaucrats who maybe, somewhere deep inside, wish that they had been smart enough to cheat once in a while, too.
Posted on September 26, 2006