Looking Over Turnitin's Shoulder

A tech tool for detecting plagiarism has received some low marks from users concerned about privacy and the service's accuracy

by Douglas MacMillan

• View Slide Show

Judging from recent research, one of the casualties of the Internet Age may be intellectual honesty. Four in ten college students surveyed said they intentionally cut and paste material from the Internet without citing the source of that information, according to a 2005 survey by Don McCabe, founding president of the Duke University-affiliated Center for Academic Integrity. That's four times as many as in 1999, the research shows.

Even more surprising to McCabe, who's now a professor of management at Rutgers University, about 77% of respondents to the 2005 survey said online plagiarism is "not a serious issue." Many students, McCabe concluded, "struggle to understand what constitutes acceptable use of the Internet."

Stopping the Cheaters

In an effort to help students and teachers achieve that understanding, Oakland (Calif.)-based iParadigms founded a service called Turnitin in 1997. Now being used by more than 9,000 schools, Turnitin uses software to help educators know whether a term paper includes previously published material that has been improperly cited. IParadigms says its membership has doubled each year for the past seven years. "[We're in] a beautiful market position," says Chief Executive John Barrie. He expects the company to sign up an additional 100,000 clients in the next 10 years.

But lately, iParadigms has hit some speed bumps that underscore the difficulty of thwarting plagiarism and other forms of cheating in the digital age. Critics say Turnitin's methods compromise copyright protections and foster a climate of suspicion between students and educators. Some also question its effectiveness in rooting out plagiarism.

Here's how Turnitin works: Students at participating schools and colleges submit most or all of their written take-home assignments to their teacher through the service's Web-connected application. It then compares the work for sentence or phrase matches against three databases: a comprehensive Internet snapshot, a library of published articles, and a pool of millions of previously submitted student papers (about 120,000 papers are submitted daily). The teacher receives a "Similarity Index" for each submission—a measure of what percentage of the work contains plagiarized material—as well as instant access to the sources in question. From there, it's up to the educational institution, which pays about 80¢ a student per year, to mete out any punishment that may be warranted.

Facing a Backlash

Students and parents from at least one school—McLean High School in Fairfax County, Va., which began using Turnitin this academic year—are crying foul. Juniors and seniors formed a committee in September and, with the support of legal counsel and a faculty sponsor, circulated a petition against McLean's use of Turnitin. The students say 70% of their classmates have signed the document. "If it's truly an educational tool, why do they insist on the requirement to archive [student] work?" says Kevin Wade, a McLean High School parent and publisher of the activist website dontturnitin.com. Wade is among parents who back the students' opposition to the use of Turnitin, arguing that a company shouldn't profit from the publication of students' work. Some also fear for students' privacy.

IParadigms' Barrie says the database is private and impenetrable. "Nobody sees a student paper that is submitted to us other than the student and their instructor," he says.

In October school administrators made some concessions, making Turnitin mandatory only for 9th and 10th graders. "Students can run their papers [against the Turnitin database] as they develop them, so the kids are learning as they move along," says Paul Regnier, spokesman for Fairfax County Schools. The county has instituted the service in 17 of its 25 schools since 2003, and pays about $380 annually per school.

Wade says he's not appeased. Among scenarios that cause him concern: A college admissions office turns up instances of copied work in an application essay that was from the same student's archived work.