What next -- a prohibition on checking references from the bibliography?

When McLean High School students write this year about Othello or immigration policy, their teachers won't be the only ones examining the papers. So will a California company that specializes in catching cheaters.

The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. School administrators said the service, which they will start using next week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time when the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else's words.

But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school's action will tar students at one of Fairfax County's academic powerhouses.

"It irked a lot of people because there's an implication of assumed guilt," said Ben Donovan, 18, a senior who helped collect 1,190 student signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service. "It's like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student."

But the school can search every car in the parking lot without a warrant -- that is part of the agreement you make with the school when you get your parking sticker. And they can search your locker without a warrant as well.

And speaking as a teacher, I've seen how rampant plagiarism really is. Several years ago, one of my students submitted a research paper in which he told of sittin on a hillside overlooking Nagasaki, mentally tracing the path of the falling atomic bomb. The paper was lfed in its entirety from a website ("but I didn't copy anything -- my uncle wrote the paper for me"). In my college-level night class, I recently received a paper which was cut and pasted from multiple sources without even anything to connect the parts -- and included the claim that the NAACP had given the author their photo archive for cataloging and preservation (a direct copy from the Library of Congress website) without a single citation.

Either our students need more to develop greater personal honesty, or they need to accept that being checked for plagiarism is part of the implied contract between teacher and students.

Posted by: Greg at 10:12 PM | Comments (41) | Add Comment
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