Thank you, Tari, for putting your finger on exactly what it is about this
discussion is scary to me. I wish that I'd read your response before I'd posted
mine, but I probably would have said what I said anyway.

One other thing that I'd like to introduce into this conversation is the fact
that we in the field of English have much smaller classes than many departments
do, and we are more highly trained to deal with plagiarism than are our
colleagues in other departments. I know that plagiarism is a larger issue on our
campus than it has been in the past. In fact, the College of Business, which is
trying to prepare its students for writing in the workplace by asking for more
writing in major classes, have much larger classes than we do, and being able to
use a product like turnitin helps them to do that and to also make it clear that
plagiarism isn't acceptable. You might say that they could use many of the
suggestions people on this list have made, including searching for plagiarisms
via google, and accomplish the same thing as they would in using turnitin. But
the fact is that students can submit their papers via turnitiin, and faculty get
both the papers and the reports automatically. And to be honest, I'm glad that
these faculty are assigning writing at all; requiring them to do what we do to
build up to these assignments is just a pipe dream. One reason I tried the
service in the first place is because my colleagues and some of my students (who
are high school and community college teachers) have asked about products like
this, and I was curious about how they actually worked.

If people have other questions about turnitin, I'd be glad to talk with them
about it on list and off list even though I've only used the service once.

I'm asking people on this list to quit casting aspersions on people's teaching,
though, because they've asked simple questions about a service that has come
into being in part because of the wealth of materials to copy on the Internet.

Judy



-----Original Message-----
From: Tari Fanderclai [mailto:tari@...]
Sent: Sun 11/24/2002 9:47 AM
To: TechRhet@yahoogroups.com
Cc:
Subject: RE: [TechRhet] Turnitin.com


On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Steve Krause wrote:

> Second, I'm not sure that the other student who got his or her stuff
> from 9 different web sites was plagiarizing exactly. Technically,
> yes, but was it a case of "theft" or a case of not knowing how to
> cite sources? I'm constantly amazed how so many of my students,
> freshman to master's students, don't realize that you have to follow
> the rules of citing sources and giving credit where credit is due. I
> get this kind of "plagiarism" all the time, but these are instances
> where I tell the student they've got to rewrite.


Actually, in a sentence that you cut, Judy says that both students
admitted that they plagiarized, one because of not having the time and the
other because of not taking the time. So leaving aside the facts that we
haven't seen the paper and that Judy can probably tell plagiarism from a
mistake, I think if a student says, "I ran out of time so I copied my
sources," we can pretty much call that plagiarism, and not just
"technically."

But anyhow, let me see if I can explain what I think is really interesting
(in kind of a scary way) about this thread:

Ed asks for turnitin users to talk about turnitin.com. Instead of
information about turnitin.com, he gets a bunch of advice from people who
don't use turnitin about how he should be teaching, how his assignments
should be constructed--even though we haven't seen his assignments or been
in his class, and that's not what he asked about.

Finally, Judy comes along and addresses Ed's actual question, explaining
how and why she uses turnitin.

So now Judy gets advice about *her* teaching!

I think we all know about designing assignments to encourage original
work*. I think we all know about recognizing mistakes in citing sources
versus deliberate plagiarism. I think we all know we've all said that
stuff before.

The question is, why can't we address Ed's question, or let someone else
address it, without suggesting that the right kind of teaching practices
would eliminate the need for it? How can this group be that suspicious of
a technology that many of us haven't even used? Is it somehow immoral to
admit that students are going to plagiarize, and to let a nice handy
computer application do some of the legwork for us?

I don't mean you can't be skeptical about an application, but that's
different from not even wanting there to be a discussion of one you
haven't even tried!

Tari



*although if we're all going to moralize, here's what I think about
knocking yourself out to design assignments that are impossible to
plagiarize: One, I once received a Georgie Anne Geyer column as a very
plausible response to a personal essay assignment--had I not happened to
read the column in the newspaper, I'd probably have had a harder time
identifying that trick--so good luck with that "impossible" thing. Two,
I'd rather design a useful and interesting assignment than an 'impossible
to plagiarize' assignment. YES, YES, I KNOW YOU CAN PROBABLY DO BOTH AND
I'M ADMITTING THAT RIGHT HERE IN ALL CAPS WHERE YOU CAN'T MISS IT WHEN
YOU'RE CUTTING UP MY PARAGRAPHS, SO DON'T BOTHER WITH THAT LECTURE. But
you can become like those department stores that are so fixated on the
tiny portion of the population that shoplifts (and for most stores,
shoplifting is NOT a significant loss of profits) that their anti-theft
devices make the experience of shopping there very unpleasant for their
"valued customers." I'd rather focus my attention on the vast majority of
students who aren't going to cheat (our valued customers) and who need to
know how to use sources correctly and effectively--and really, not knowing
how to use sources effectively is the real problem--once you're not
stuffing them into the paper because the assignment calls for three
outside sources or whatever, it becomes easier to see how they should be
cited, and, probably, easier to write a proper paper than to hunt around
for something suitable to rip off.



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