Turnitin Redux

Last week, completely by accident, I discovered that a small tech committee at the school has put out bid requests for a plagiarism detection system. In an earlier comment, one member of the committee said something to the effect, "We have the money, so let's go ahead and spend it."

The English program has done its best to make clear that there are ever so many problems with adopting this software. Most of those are included in my earlier posting from a conference in August. The essence is that Turnitin exploits students by using their papers for its profit, and we, by adopting the software, demean students by assuming that they cheat. Moreover, we don't have an infrastructure in place to provide a procedure for appeal, nor do we have an agency to provide reliable training for instructors.

I figure that it's hopeless to fight the adoption of the software, because when we have money we spend it. I thought, though, that we could at least avoid exploiting students by demanding that Turnitin not archive students' papers. When I asked the committee chair to prevent archiving, I got more than I could have hoped for.

One of the committee members actually stated that he wanted the software because he had used the same assignment for 20 years and had lots of papers floating around out there. So he said he needs to have the student papers archived. Apparently he wants to archive all 20 years. Hmm, that sounds like a lawsuit in the making. Can you really archive papers from students who are no longer students???

He said there was no other way to design that assignment. Big error: When I was doing WAC, I designed four dynamite versions of that assignment for another school, and I did not hesitate to tell this individual so. I'm sure I made no friends with my reply to the post, but I felt that I had to ask him if he really was using his own lack of assignment design as a legitimate excuse to spend thousands of dollars on software that would demean and exploit students.