Looking Over Turnitin's Shoulder

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"Yes, it will identify the source as being the applicant, but when a university is processing tens of thousands of applications, do you want to trust a clerk in an admissions office to make this connection?" he says. He's also concerned that future employers may have access to the Turnitin database and use it to retrieve writing samples that are several years old.

Privacy Concerns

Even more troubling to some parents and students is the possibility that the Turnitin database could be sold off to another business. The service's mandatory privacy policy provides for this very scenario: "As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy businesses or assets, or Turnitin might be acquired by another company. In any of those circumstances, personal information in our databases may be included among the transferred assets."

Wade and a team of other concerned parents have spent recent months trying to build a legal case against the Turnitin service, retaining the counsel of intellectual-property specialist Robert Vanderhye of Nixon & Vanderhye in Arlington, Va. The group says it's near filing a lawsuit aimed at forcing the company to discontinue archiving student work and to delete the millions papers in its database. "From an intellectual-property perspective, the copying of student papers for comparison is technically a copyright violation," says Dan Burke, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota.

Dubious Similarities

Some users also raise concerns about the effectiveness of the service. Chris Guy, a professor of physics at Imperial College in London, where Turnitin has been in use for three years, assigned an open-ended paper where students could delve into any physics-related topic of their choosing, as long as they went well beyond Wikipedia-like Internet sources and consulted academic journals of esteem.

Guy became suspicious when he received students' Turnitin reports. Many Similarity Indices were between 20% and 50%, and offered as proof totally unrelated sources (e.g., an Australian car magazine as a reference for a paper on the Big Bang Theory), Internet sources that turned up "404 File Not Found" errors, and papers from students in other parts of the world whom his students vow they have never heard of. He asks, "Are you a plagiarist if you don't reference a source you've never seen?"

Guy abstained from further usage of Turnitin in his class, but he began to submit papers of his own creation to the service as a diagnostic test. Not only did Turnitin make many implausible links when it positively detected plagiarism, but when he purposely plagiarized several prominent academic journals and mainstream publications, they didn't show up on the report at all. An entire word-for-word passage from Scientific American rated a 0% on the Similarity Index.

Guy is urging his school's administration to cease using Turnitin. Last year the University of Kansas and Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, banned use of the service on campus while other schools, including Syracuse University, are considering similar action, according to published news reports.

Guilty Until Innocent?

Critics also express concern that the service promotes a climate of mistrust between students, teachers, and administrators, because it assumes that kids are guilty until proven innocent. Barrie responds to these claims by likening his service to a referee on a football field or a proctor in an exam hall.

The Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC-IP) last September issued a statement addressing plagiarism-detection services and the compromises they pose to the academic environment. The 13-year-old association of college professors warned all teachers and administrators that the use of applications like Turnitin "conflicts with best practices for fostering student engagement and learning," and creates a "hostile environment."

Expanding Its Uses

But the CCCC-IP thinks that if Turnitin is used in the right context, it can be a productive tool—for instance, if students are allowed to play around with the application instead of seeing it as a binding verdict. Michael Day, co-chair of the CCCC committee on computers in composition & communication and director of first-year composition at Northern Illinois University, recommends teachers and students use Turnitin to "critically investigate such notions as ownership, property, originality, and copying intellectual work." He continues in an e-mail, "In an age dominated by Web and Internet writing, wikis, blogs, remixing, and patch-writing, we owe it to our students to interrogate such notions."

Provided that iParadigms and its flagship Turnitin service weather the storm, as Barrie foretells, it also hopes to make waves outside the world of academia. Its other service, iThenticate, is a database of commercial documents, designed to give businesses a reliable way to determine the originality and authenticity of job applications, commissioned white papers, and other areas where plagiarism could hurt organizations financially and otherwise.

This service just got off the ground in the past two years, but already boasts high-profile clients including the U.N., the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. Says Barrie, "We've reached a point where people cannot simply wonder whether something is original or not before they grade it—or pay for it."

Click here to see a slide show of "High-Tech Cheat Sheets."

Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.