6.7: Plagiarism Detection Services are Money Well Spent

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Cheryl E. Ball & Drew M. Loewe ed.
West Virginia University via Digital Publishing Institute and West Virginia University Libraries

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Author: Stephanie Vie, University of Central Florida, @digirhet.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, a kind of plagiarism paranoia has begun to grip us with a growing sense that we must do something to address the ease with which authors can copy and paste their work. This issue certainly crops up in the university setting. Some instructors may begin to see it as a personal affront to their teaching, questioning whether students think they are too clueless to notice. As plagiarism paranoia takes hold, faculty begin to wonder how many other students are plagiarizing or have plagiarized in the past. Maybe John, since he seems to never be paying attention. Or maybe Kim, since she doesn’t write all that well. Or what about Bob, because his essay was so well written? It seems sad when instructors begin to fear that students are plagiarizing because they’ve turned in well-written essays.

In the wake of ongoing intellectual scandals, plagiarism (and its resultant paranoia) has been a subject of discussion outside the university as well; newspapers have reported on multiple ethical lapses by famous writers. Noted historian Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several of his books almost word-forword; he apologized immediately, blaming it on sloppy footnoting. Similarly, Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of plagiarism and faulted poor note-taking. Susan Sontag, also accused of plagiarism in 2000, excused her borrowing as literary effect. Jayson Blair, Kaavya Viswanathan, Jane Goodall, Alex Haley, Fareed Zakaria, Jonah Lehrer: The list continues, with many of these authors settling out of court or pulling copies of their work from further publication. Famous speakers, including those in the academic and political arenas, are also regularly called out for plagiarizing parts of their speeches. Naturally, in response to what seems like rampant plagiarism, and what author David Callahan has called a “cheating culture,” we look for solutions. Initially, plagiarism detection technologies like Turnitin.com or Blackboard’s SafeAssign sound like ideal solutions. These technologies promise to detect how much writing is unoriginal in a piece, allowing the viewer of one of their originality reports to assess the level of potential plagiarism in a written document.

However, plagiarism detection technologies are not a magic bullet, nor the solution to the perceived problem of increasing plagiarism in an Internet age. For one, research has shown that plagiarism detection technologies like Turnitin don’t work particularly well. Debora Weber-Wulff, author of False Feathers: A Perspective on Academic Plagiarism, has tested various plagiarism detection technologies from 2004 to 2013. Her tests illustrate a variety of problems with the use of plagiarism detection technologies for their intended purpose. They flag false positives readily—that is, indicating material is plagiarized when it is not. Without careful reading, the results make it look as though authors are plagiarizing when they are not (e.g., flagging a bibliography or common phrases, and thus indicating a high level of unoriginality in a document). False negatives are also an issue, where the software does not discern unoriginal material. In this case, actual plagiarized material is overlooked by the plagiarism detection technology. This is a significant issue when dealing with a technology whose main purpose is to ferret out unoriginal material. If individuals are going to rely on plagiarism detection technologies, they need to interpret the originality reports, which often include reports on the percentage of potentially plagiarized material, incredibly carefully.

In addition to the time it takes to review these reports, plagiarism detection technologies are expensive. Many academic institutions must pay for subscriptions to popular plagiarism detection technologies like Turnitin.com or Blackboard’s SafeAssign. Because of the high price invested in purchasing these tools, certain schools will either mandate or strongly encourage faculty members to use the software to offset that heavy investment. For example, I work at the University of Central Florida, and at our institution, we get a price break on Turnitin because we were early adopters of this technology. This means we only pay $20,000 per year for mandatory access to Turnitin. I was taken aback when I started in 2013 and was told all faculty members supervising dissertations and theses must submit their students’ work to Turnitin before a defense. In addition, all faculty members’ grant applications must go through iThenticate, another arm of iParadigms LLC’s massive conglomeration of services that include GradeMark, PeerMark, OriginalityCheck (aka Turnitin), and iThenticate for Admissions. Other institutions will pay higher prices, such as the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where a 2013 Turnitin renewal quote was £25,000 per year, or around $37,000 USD. Florida State University in Jacksonville was quoted a one-year renewal cost of $57,000 USD in 2012. Compared to these prices, Blackboard’s SafeAssign may seem like a much better investment—after all, it’s free because it’s available bundled with the learning management system Blackboard. But of course, the learning management system itself costs money to an institution, and these costs are comparable to Turnitin—anywhere from $50,000 per year up to six figures for large institutions.

Plagiarism detection technologies have been critiqued because they often disrespect the intellectual property of the author whose work is being submitted. An author’s work is submitted to a plagiarism detection site and then usually saved as part of the tool’s databases to be used in the future when new works are submitted for originality checks. I use the passive voice intentionally here: An author’s work is submitted. It is often not the author himor herself submitting work to the plagiarism detection technology; it is more frequently someone else submitting another person’s work to the tool for it to be checked. The problem then lies in whether the author consented to his or her work being submitted to the plagiarism detection tool.

In the instance of Turnitin, for example, student authors at schools like McLean High School in Virginia have collected signatures on petitions against the mandatory use of the service. These students and others like them argue that, because their writing is saved as part of Turnitin’s massive database for use in checking future papers for plagiarism, the company is profiting from their intellectual property. The four student plaintiffs from McLean asked for compensation, arguing that their papers were added to Turnitin’s database against their will; however, the district court ruled in favor of Turnitin, setting a precedent for future arguments. The district court granted summary judgment to iParadigms (creator of Turnitin) on the basis of two things: The court argued that the students entered into binding agreements when they clicked “I Agree” upon uploading their work. Second, the court found that—according to the lawsuit Vanderhye v. iParadigms LLC—Turnitin’s use of the students’ work in its databases was “transformative because its purpose was to prevent plagiarism by comparative use,” and this did not impact the market value for high school term papers.

There may not be much of a market value for high school papers, but these papers are indeed students’ original work—and if they don’t consent to include that work in a massive database for a for-profit plagiarism detection service, it is troubling that they can ultimately be forced to do so or else risk their grades or their ability to graduate. In the case of the graduate students I work with at the University of Central Florida, I must submit their dissertations or master’s theses to Turnitin’s iThenticate system—and I can do this without notifying them and without their consent. It’s a condition of their degree completion, and if they care about their intellectual property being stored forever in a plagiarism detection technology’s database for future use and profit, there’s not much they can do about it.

So What Do We Do?

I have noted here that plagiarism detection technologies are expensive, don’t work particularly well, and often profit from the intellectual property of others—frequently without their consent. Plagiarism detection technologies engage in stereotypical understandings of writing and the composing process, and they frequently fail to embrace current writing studies scholarship and best practices regarding the writing process. In that case, what should we do?An entirely refreshing option is to give up on catching every plagiarist. This would entail embracing some of the features of the so-called Internet Age that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Yes, it’s true that the wealth of material available online has made it easier to copy and paste. On one hand, this is true literally: I can highlight text, type control-C on my keyboard, and then control-V to paste that text into a word processing document. As easy as that, I have copied and pasted online material. But on the other hand, this is true metaphorically as well. The idea of copying and pasting—or what scholars like Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig have termed remix—is well suited to the Internet Age. Today, I can find hundreds of thousands of images, songs, sounds, and, yes, words online, and I can mix them together in new and interesting ways to create soundscapes, collages, and other transformative works. This creativity has led to the creation of sites like Creative

Commons, where authors can choose from a variety of ways to license their original works, such as “Attribution—ShareAlike,” which the site describes as allowing “others [to] remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.” Rather than the traditional all rights reserved emphasis of copyright laws, Creative Commons licenses allow creators of works to reserve some rights and indicate to others their level of comfort with transformative use of their materials.

What would be the value of giving up the fight to catch all plagiarists and instead embrace more fully a remix culture? As filmmaker Kirby Ferguson explains, “Everything is a remix.” Everything already is borrowed, in some way or another, from earlier ideas. Ferguson’s TED Talk on the subject draws on examples like Bob Dylan’s and Danger Mouse’s music, technological features like the iPhone’s multi-touch, and the movie Avatar, among others. His goal is to illustrate that the boundaries between plagiarism and homage, copying and allusion, are porous and these seemingly black-and-white boundaries are truly gray areas. As Henry Ford noted in a 1909 interview, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.”

The advantage here of casting aside the hunt for plagiarists and embracing a remix culture is that we can embrace the idea that nothing we create will be entirely new and that’s okay. For many writers, we become blocked when we feel as though good writing must only be game-changing writing, the kind of thing that says something new and entirely different, that no one has ever said before. And who can blame students for finding it difficult to compose something supposedly new when faced with timeworn prompts asking them to write a five-paragraph essay about gun control or the death penalty? Indeed, for those of us who teach writing, helping new authors get past this focus on game-changing writing is crucial; they frequently believe that, in order to enter into the conversation, they have to find something out there to write about that no one has ever said or done before. But even for more seasoned writers, the expanse of the blank page coupled with the expectation of genius is incredibly daunting. The use of remix allows for the creative inclusion of others’ ideas, making a space for works that are derivative or transformative of other people’s work. For all authors (not just students), this might involve deliberately weaving in others’ words as a form of collaborative collage to illustrate the transformative potential of such work, or relying on Creative-Commons licensed materials and other public copyright licensed materials in projects. It also might ask us to learn more about fair use rights and, further, exercise our fair use rights as a form of empowerment.

Keywords

Blackboard, Creative Commons, plagiarism, SafeAssign, Turnitin

Author Bio

Stephanie Vie has been writing and speaking about plagiarism detection technologies for over a decade. She has presented at academic conferences and various institutions and has been interviewed about plagiarism detection in The Chronicle of Higher Education. She works at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and can be found on Twitter at @digirhet.

So What Do We Do?

Further Reading

Keywords

Author Bio