A new plagiarism-checking service doesn’t sit well with some high school students.

According to a recent Washington Post article, the online database Turnitin is gaining popularity among high schools and colleges. For a fee, instructors can upload papers to a national database, and Turnitin will check them against thousands of other submitted papers and scholarly articles, checking for suspiciously similar passages.

According to the article, students at a Virginia high school are rebelling against the system, saying it interferes with their intellectual property rights and presumes students “guilty until proven innocent.”

As long as the database isn’t releasing papers to other users, the service isn’t really violating students’ rights. But deterrent value aside, Turnitin would probably not be an effective tool for reducing plagiarism, especially at the college level.

For an instructor, warning students that they use the service could deter some plagiarism, and it could help prevent students from turning in others’ work from previous years. But some will still find a way to cheat, regardless of the measures in place.

Using such a huge database to detect plagiarism carries a big risk of false positives. For many writing assignments there are only so many plausible answers, and it’s probably a safe bet that one analysis paper will come out similar to another when compared to thousands of others on the same topic.

According to the article, some teachers say they use Turnitin to teach their students about plagiarism and citing their sources properly. But is using a Web site not geared toward teaching really teaching anything?
Teachers who do choose to use the program need to be clear about their intentions with it, whether they plan to use the results to scan for plagiarism or simply as a teaching tool. In order to reap some benefits, Turnitin needs to be used as more than just a scare tactic.