Turnitin Letter Draft

Here's a draft of a letter that I'm proposing English send to the powers that be on campus in order to get them to protect the students' intellectual property from Turnitin abuse.

Our students’ intellectual property is in jeopardy, and we must protect those rights. As faculty, we are committed to helping students develop a sense of authorship and ownership of their thinking and writing. It should be no surprise, then, that we feel compelled to express our distress at the recent decision to purchase Turnitin plagiarism detection service.

Of the detection systems, Turnitin is especially egregious in that it exploits students’ original work, using it for its own profit without acknowledgement or compensation to the authors. That, as some of our students have noted, is the definition of plagiarism. Many JCCC students do not yet have the confidence to claim their intellectual property, and, certainly, they do not comprehend how misuse of their property now may have substantial ramifications for them in the future.For this reason, we instructors would be remiss if we did not speak on their behalf. Turnitin operates under the assumption that teachers, rather than students, have rights to student original work.

That premise runs counter to everything we know about both pedagogy and writing. Especially serious is the prospect that, without restriction, some faculty would archive documents created by former students no longer under the jurisdiction of JCCC. As an institution, we protect the privacy of students’ personal information, including their grades. Shouldn’t we, then, protect their rights to their thinking, as raw and tentative as it may be?

Some argue that this use of their documents is a legitimate part of the educational process. To the contrary, the educational process should be between the teacher and student, not between teacher and corporation, a corporation that uses student work for profit and to data-mine for “unoriginal” writing.Schools that choose to use Turnitin while respecting students’ rights to their intellectual property insist that Turnitin eliminate archiving of their students’ papers.We believe that JCCC should be a school that protects its students’ work by refusing to have their work archived.

Related to the issue of protecting students’ intellectual property, we are concerned at the apparent lack of infrastructure related to Turnitin. What will be the opt-out policy for students who object to having their work submitted to Turnitin? What sort of disclaimer will inform students of the use of the service and their rights related to it? What will be the process for dispute resolution for both faculty and students when disputes arise in interpretation of the reports? What agency will assist faculty in interpreting and responding to the raw data? Turnitin, on its web site, claims that only 30 % of students plagiarize, and that amount may well be even smaller because inadvertent error is not distinguished from intentional plagiarism.

To our knowledge, JCCC has no universal reporting procedure for incidences of plagiarism. Do we have a benchmark, then, against which to measure the success of this service? Even without one, it would seem important to collect data to measure cost effectiveness. What agency will collect that data?

We’re sure that ATAC [committee] considers this purchase as a technological service to the school. Turnitin, however, is not primarily a technological matter; it is a technology that affects instruction and learning. Its nature creates ethical, educational, and procedural ramifications for both teachers and students. Consequently, it is unfortunate that there was not broad faculty involvement in the decision making process, especially in impact and implementation. In the absence of that discussion, we appeal to you to act to protect our students’ rights to their intellectual property.