First, Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. It was not designed as a teaching tool. I remain dubious that it can serve a purpose for which it was never intended better than other forms of instruction. One could easily focus on the most common mistakes students make on their in-text citations without having to resort to Turnitin software—the money spent on the software and the time spent providing students a visual walkthrough of the system would seem better invested in explaining the purpose and principles of scholarship, than teaching students one particular software package.
Second, as an editor and author as well as an academic, I feel strongly that student copyright and confidentiality is routinely violated by Turnitin retaining copies of student work in (an American) database. Instructors may not have an issue with this, but many authors and students feel this is a violation of their rights.
Third, instructors using Turnitin software as a teaching tool by having students run their first drafts through Turnitin.com, adjusting their papers until they get a better Turnitin score, ends up mandating a particular writing process—a common but deeply mistaken approach to teaching writing. My commentary on my frustration with such writing instruction is in this earlier post on this blog.
Fourth, focusing on "catching plagiarism"—which I would argue is more than implicit in a software package called "turn it in"—is in my view a wrong approach to teaching the importance of citation scholarship. Students learn that they must follow certain (to them bizarre and arbitrary rules) to manage the score delivered by a software package and does not, I would argue, properly socialize students into the philosophy of scholarship. This approach does not seem to acknowledge that students come from other cultures/philosophical positions that may view the universe very differently. For example, the mashup artist who takes a hundred different film clips, edits them together with some other person's soundtrack to create a new YouTube video that gets a million likes and a monetized video feed is going to need more than Turnitin software to understand why that same behaviour in university gets them a 0 and a yelling at. Effective instruction is not about explaining the rules, it's about converting students to our worldview. I do not perceive Turnitin software as a useful tool in this process.
I realize mine is a minority view. Turnitin software is 'easy' for instructors and allows them to pretend to be addressing the issues of academic integrity which large classes and a host of other structural issues have made more difficult to manage. That 'easy' or 'widely promoted' equates to 'best practice' or 'best outcomes' remains to be demonstrated to me. I argue there is a difference between 'trained' and 'educated' and using Turnitin to teach rules strikes me (and I dare say most students) like a punitive training exercise rather than an effective approach to socializing students into a new and better worldview.
As I have mentioned before in this blog, the more appropriate approach to issues of Internet plagiarism is to scrap the sort of assignments that allow for 'off-the-shelf' responses, and instead shift to authentic assessments that require original thought and personal commitment. If one asks students for a paper on McBeth, one should not be surprised if students go online to find them one. Instead, ask students how they interacted with the text to relate it to their own lives and or something of that ilk. If your students can't be bothered to actually do your assignments, that likely has more to do with it being a bad assignment, than about having bad students.
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