At the beginning of the semester, AU launched a pilot program with TurnItIn.com. About 20 professors and their 1,000 students are in the pilot program. Along with peer review and an online grading system, the site allows professors to submit papers to the site's database to be checked for plagiarism. The site compares students' papers to scholarly journals and Internet content, as well as a database of 10 million papers written by high school and college students, according to tuftsdaily.com.
The use of TurnItIn as a teaching tool makes sense. Many freshmen simply don't know how to cite properly when they arrive at school.
Use of the site to alleviate professors' workloads also makes sense. Faculty will have more time to look objectively at the whole of a student's paper if they don't also have to worry about whether or not the paper is plagiarized.
Certain details of the program, however, need further clarification. How will it weed out students who knowingly and intentionally plagiarized versus those who may have just forgotten to put in one citation? How does the program deal with assignments like biology lab reports, in which a large portion of the information will be not only identical across the class but will undoubtedly pop up in other papers? There's only so many ways to describe the life cycle of a snail.
What about professors who have been assigning the same papers for years? Some of the same information is bound to come up again.
Use of the program also creates fears about the future of objective grading. Will professors really just use it to ensure there is no plagiarism, or will grades eventually become dependent solely on how much of the work is similar to other papers?
The most important question, however, is whether the program is even necessary. There are 60-80 academic code violations per year at AU, half of which are plagiarism. Considering the number of papers produced by the student body every year, that's a pretty small percentage. The Academic Integrity Code is printed on every syllabus and every professor gives lectures on how not to plagiarize on the first day of classes. The small number of people who do plagiarize must be pretty determined given the preventative measures already in place.
If the university is really concerned about plagiarism, they should consider instituting an honor code like other universities have. These codes prohibit plagiarism, cheating, stealing and other types of dishonest behavior by creating an attitude of honesty on campus, and are enforced by the student body.
AU students didn't come to college to be baby-sat by their professors and an Internet program. Treat them like adults.
