4 ms·

This is a good issue to teach students about civil disobedience. If you are an A student and you refuse to turn your papers in to turnitin, are your teachers re

This is a good issue to teach students about civil disobedience. If you are an A student and you refuse to turn your papers in to turnitin, are your teachers really going to fail you? No, they won't. Especially since No Child Left Behind, A-level students are a prized asset to every school. Schools will really pay attention if a bunch of A-level students work together against a school policy, risking their own GPA. Send out a press release to the local press about your protest and your entire city will be working with you. Nobody likes these kinds of "guilty until proven innocent" policies. Even a single student protesting alone really risks very little by refusing to submit his paper to turnitin. Teachers want their students to succeed, and it is difficult for them to explain to a parent "I gave your student a lower grade on a technicality even though his work was excellent." Some teachers might try to play hard ball but if you are persistent you will win.

JimmyL 17y ago
Aside from the high school alluded to in this story, I've never seen Turnitin used in a high school context - one would think that HS papers generally aren't sophisticated enough to make it difficult to tell if there's been some plagiarizing. In the university context, however, I've seen it used pretty heavily - and if you think that professors won't give out failing grades for people who refuse to submit their papers to it, you're (in my experience) dead wrong, seeing as the edict to make student use it generally comes down from the department heads. We had a small controversy about this a few years ago at my old school. Some very smart students refused to submit their papers, and got Fs on them (for papers which all parties agreed were A- or better work). They eventually took it all the way through the university grievance process to the school Senate, where the decision was overturned and the new policy created: you can either submit your paper to Turnitin, or you can hand in all your notes and rough drafts with the work to be graded.
- dhimes 17y ago
  My wife just confirmed that my son uses it and he's a freshman in a public high school.
- silencio 17y ago
  I vividly remember hating dealing with Turnitin way back when I was a freshman in high school, which was like 5-6 years ago. I'm not sure what the point was, since there was way more cheating going on during exams than there was plagiarism in English essays. On a small sidenote, my last college English class involved a group project that also included some individual writing as well. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, one member decided to copy and paste her submission straight from Wikipedia. Pproving that everyone else had no part in her stupidity took an unhealthy amount of time, especially when the person in question kept insisting she didn't plagiarize anything. Sophisticated indeed.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    No one else in the group recognized that the writing wasn't hers?
    - silencio 17y ago
      Admittedly it was our fault for not realizing where the writing came from, but she was the straggler in the group that never participated in our email conversations and sent us her portion of the project the hour before it was due. I know there's always a slacker in a group project, but none of us imagined she would have done what she did...we just thought she was just procrastinating and so someone else quickly proofread for egregious grammar mistakes and then sent it off. Then in the individual work related to the group project (i.e. our thoughts, the work we did, etc.) she claimed just like we did that it was all her original writing. So it ended up being a mess and the rest of us four being accused of academic dishonesty too because she wouldn't stop insisting that we were lying about her, until we came up with our separate and complete email conversations consisting of a couple hundred emails with research and drafts and my versioned work (thank goodness for svn?) which included what the others did with no trace of her writing and nothing but excuses and delays in her emails. I think I've learned from my mistakes (but too bad something like turnitin isn't available to students, heh).
      - JimmyL 17y ago
        +1 for using svn for schoolwork. No matter what schoolwork I did, if it was on a computer it was in a repo. Nothing beats a plagiarism accusation like being able to provide 40 revisions of your previous work spread over a few months.
silencio 17y ago
I wish I thought of this back in my high school english classes and got everyone together to not submit anything. However, all the teachers I remember did give failing grades for assignments not submitted to turnitin. If you had enough failing assignment grades, obviously, you fail the class. The reasoning would be that you had to complete your entire assignment, which involved submitting to turnitin and physically to the teacher by the due date, to receive the maximum amount of credit. Failing that, not turning it in made the teacher question your "academic honesty". Very frustrating, especially as I remember there were some students that found it very difficult to get access to a computer to even type up their essays, let alone internet connections to submit online.
- briansmith 17y ago
  There is another way to protest: attack the credibility of turn-it-in. Publish drafts of your papers all over the web where the Turn-it-in bot is sure to find them. Wikipedia would also be a great place to submit fragments of your papers. then submit fragments of your papers and your friends' papers directly to turn-it-in seperately before you submit your own paper. Then all your papers will come up as false positives. When the instructors confront you, produce the original papers as evidence that you were just copying yourself (which is totally allowed). As far as I know, Turn-it-in doesn't really provide the instructor with a good way of verifying the original source of a paper. So, it is difficult for instructors to use turn-it-in as evidence of plagerism when students are gaming the system like that. It is also why anybody that challenges an accusation of plagerism based on evidence from these services will always win (at least in court).
  - silencio 17y ago
    I am so incredibly sold on that idea, it's just such a shame I don't have classes where turnitin is used :( However, I do remember that most of my HS english teachers were aware of the possibility of false positives. Their first reaction wasn't to accuse anyone of plagiarism, they just asked to see drafts and research related to the paper in question - or any sort of evidence to show that you were legitimately working on something. Turnitin for them was just automated checking to see if anyone was stupid enough to buy an essay or copy something near verbatim.

JimmyL 17y ago

Aside from the high school alluded to in this story, I've never seen Turnitin used in a high school context - one would think that HS papers generally aren't sophisticated enough to make it difficult to tell if there's been some plagiarizing. In the university context, however, I've seen it used pretty heavily - and if you think that professors won't give out failing grades for people who refuse to submit their papers to it, you're (in my experience) dead wrong, seeing as the edict to make student use it generally comes down from the department heads. We had a small controversy about this a few years ago at my old school. Some very smart students refused to submit their papers, and got Fs on them (for papers which all parties agreed were A- or better work). They eventually took it all the way through the university grievance process to the school Senate, where the decision was overturned and the new policy created: you can either submit your paper to Turnitin, or you can hand in all your notes and rough drafts with the work to be graded.

dhimes 17y ago
My wife just confirmed that my son uses it and he's a freshman in a public high school.
silencio 17y ago
I vividly remember hating dealing with Turnitin way back when I was a freshman in high school, which was like 5-6 years ago. I'm not sure what the point was, since there was way more cheating going on during exams than there was plagiarism in English essays. On a small sidenote, my last college English class involved a group project that also included some individual writing as well. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, one member decided to copy and paste her submission straight from Wikipedia. Pproving that everyone else had no part in her stupidity took an unhealthy amount of time, especially when the person in question kept insisting she didn't plagiarize anything. Sophisticated indeed.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  No one else in the group recognized that the writing wasn't hers?
  - silencio 17y ago
    Admittedly it was our fault for not realizing where the writing came from, but she was the straggler in the group that never participated in our email conversations and sent us her portion of the project the hour before it was due. I know there's always a slacker in a group project, but none of us imagined she would have done what she did...we just thought she was just procrastinating and so someone else quickly proofread for egregious grammar mistakes and then sent it off. Then in the individual work related to the group project (i.e. our thoughts, the work we did, etc.) she claimed just like we did that it was all her original writing. So it ended up being a mess and the rest of us four being accused of academic dishonesty too because she wouldn't stop insisting that we were lying about her, until we came up with our separate and complete email conversations consisting of a couple hundred emails with research and drafts and my versioned work (thank goodness for svn?) which included what the others did with no trace of her writing and nothing but excuses and delays in her emails. I think I've learned from my mistakes (but too bad something like turnitin isn't available to students, heh).
    - JimmyL 17y ago
      +1 for using svn for schoolwork. No matter what schoolwork I did, if it was on a computer it was in a repo. Nothing beats a plagiarism accusation like being able to provide 40 revisions of your previous work spread over a few months.

silencio 17y ago

I wish I thought of this back in my high school english classes and got everyone together to not submit anything. However, all the teachers I remember did give failing grades for assignments not submitted to turnitin. If you had enough failing assignment grades, obviously, you fail the class. The reasoning would be that you had to complete your entire assignment, which involved submitting to turnitin and physically to the teacher by the due date, to receive the maximum amount of credit. Failing that, not turning it in made the teacher question your "academic honesty". Very frustrating, especially as I remember there were some students that found it very difficult to get access to a computer to even type up their essays, let alone internet connections to submit online.

briansmith 17y ago
There is another way to protest: attack the credibility of turn-it-in. Publish drafts of your papers all over the web where the Turn-it-in bot is sure to find them. Wikipedia would also be a great place to submit fragments of your papers. then submit fragments of your papers and your friends' papers directly to turn-it-in seperately before you submit your own paper. Then all your papers will come up as false positives. When the instructors confront you, produce the original papers as evidence that you were just copying yourself (which is totally allowed). As far as I know, Turn-it-in doesn't really provide the instructor with a good way of verifying the original source of a paper. So, it is difficult for instructors to use turn-it-in as evidence of plagerism when students are gaming the system like that. It is also why anybody that challenges an accusation of plagerism based on evidence from these services will always win (at least in court).
- silencio 17y ago
  I am so incredibly sold on that idea, it's just such a shame I don't have classes where turnitin is used :( However, I do remember that most of my HS english teachers were aware of the possibility of false positives. Their first reaction wasn't to accuse anyone of plagiarism, they just asked to see drafts and research related to the paper in question - or any sort of evidence to show that you were legitimately working on something. Turnitin for them was just automated checking to see if anyone was stupid enough to buy an essay or copy something near verbatim.