Ethics Newsline®

The April 2 commentary about the anti-plagiarism program Turnitin prompted many responses, including several from educators and students who are affected in some way by plagiarism and the efforts to stop it.

The commentary essentially argued that it is inconsistent to adopt an honor code while insisting that students submit their works through a plagiarism-detection program. It also held that technological solutions don’t always prove to be accurate or efficient and are not an ideal way to monitor human behavior.

Responses to those arguments broke about fifty-fifty in agreement and disagreement. Among the more commonly cited arguments opposed to the commentary’s view was the fact that technological monitoring provides a net benefit in other areas of society, and that philosophical arguments against it are outweighed by practical results.

One reader, who teaches a course in leadership and ethics, used a traffic-camera analogy: “Lawyers argue a driver’s ‘rights’ are infringed as though it were okay to speed through an intersection because you were talking on your cell phone, eating a burger, and late for an appointment. Legal, yes. Ethical? Let’s see you get T-boned at an intersection and then turn around and argue against stopping people running red lights just ‘because.’ “

A response by the head of an education association also invoked the traffic-control analogy. “We frequently hear complaints by speeders of the ‘unfairness’ of radar cameras catching them speeding. Any moral indignation by the rest of us about that? All the data shows that the vast majority of students at the high school and college level admit to cheating, and the paper mills on the Internet facilitate the dishonesty. Turnitin is one way to discourage what is so tempting. Let’s call it a tool that should accompany the speed limit signs you post in your ethical admonishments to your students as each semester begins.”

But others were less comfortable with technological monitoring. An educator noted that while we (generally) willingly submit to traffic cameras and radar guns, there has to be a point at which monitoring is no longer appropriate: “We could probably reduce fraud by requiring a lie-detector test for the recipients of a bank loan, but would we, or should we, sanction that?”

Some had doubts about the basic workability of systems that monitor plagiarism. A former graduate student writes that he was unjustly accused of plagiarism and as a result failed a class after another system (not Turnitin) used at his institution flagged phrases such as “furthermore, we can see…” and “due to this.” Another reader, a businessman, cited what he saw as the futility of technological dueling: “Look at … recent doping and steroid scandals. They have been testing for years and have had significant finds, yet there is a community of scientists and researchers working right now on new drugs to evade detection.” Another speculated that if you build a big enough database, “everyone will be guilty of plagiarism. Where does it end?”

Some respondents agreed with the premise that an honor code and good role modeling would be more effective than technology, and some also argued that the “presumption of guilt” implicit in the use of a detection system degrades trust between teacher and student.

Regardless of their view on technological monitoring of plagiarism, though, readers’ comments strongly reinforced how corrosive the problem has become in the academic world. Several educators wrote that not only has plagiarism become rampant, but that it apparently has gained a measure of acceptance as well. A college professor concluded that “the most disturbing outcome of this entire furor is the increasing number of students and parents that believe you have to use any means available to you to get ahead, including cheating.”

A high school teacher wrote that she was confronted by an angry parent who didn’t dispute that her daughter’s paper was plagiarized, but insisted that it was unfair that the teacher did not do a blanket search on unsuspicious papers, leading to a suggestion from the administration that the teacher should use Turnitin to avoid the appearance of an unfair situation. “[T]his type of parent interaction is becoming more common, where parents are more concerned with why their child was caught than with what rule their child broke,” she wrote.

A school administrator concluded: “For those who are really concerned, I wish they could experience the audacity of parents who charge into our school and challenge every reasonable effort to discipline — not punish — their children when honor code violations occur. These parents challenge the effort or the method for determining [the plagiarism], no matter that the evidence is clear and often embarrassingly damning in proving no attempt by the student to honorably or honestly complete the assignment.”