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"Drawing Hands"
by M. C. Escher:"ESCHER on ESCHER Exploring the Infinite",
p. 59 Published in 1989 by HARRY N. ABRAMS, INC., New York |
Academia has a quandary. How does it effectively
discourage plagiarism without discouraging effective inquiry and original
thought? Are students frightened into believing that their professors are
working against them when it comes to the efforts employed in regulating
scholarly writing? Anti-plagiarism websites have grown in popularity and usage
in recent years, from ‘college-bound’ high school curriculum to universities –
the hopeful breeding ground of new ideas and concepts. But is the practice of intellectual
scrutiny inhibiting intellectual exploration?
“Because
of this program, the vast majority of you who do your own work and cite your
sources of information properly will not have to compete with students who
commit undetected plagiarism.” –Tom Fleming,
University of Arizona coordinator for TurnItIn
There are two inherent flaws with the approach
above. First, there is the implication of competition within a system of
accepting original thought. Secondly, Mr. Fleming fails to warn students that
all creative works submitted to Turnitin will be placed in a database that will
ultimately strip them of their copyright protection of their original creative
work.
There is a third major flaw within Mr. Fleming's
message to the University of Arizona faculty, one that implicates them in
abdicating their proper authority to encourage student growth. He instructs the
faculty to include the following statement in their syllabus:
"If
you decide to take and continue in this course, you are agreeing to submit your
papers online, when so instructed, to a plagiarism-prevention program called
TurnItIn.com." - Tom Fleming
This one statement is an implied threat to every
student who is required to take certain courses to finalize their degree.
Instead of giving a student the option to use said software, they are demanding
it as if it were the quintessential programs to stop plagiarism. The veiled
threats and underhanded collection of intellectual assets must be stopped.
Academia should encourage students to explore and
expand their own horizons of learning, not worry about what the next student is
producing. Colleges and universities should be sowing seeds of individual
perspective on multiple streams of inquiry. The implication of competition
assumes that all will eventually realize the same stream or pattern of
thinking, that which is already fully realized by the professor and detailed in
the course syllabus. A syllabus that guides areas of thought, cited resources,
and supposed length will ultimately breed conformity of thought, which will
ultimately be picked up by the algorithmic software as a plagiarism flag. The
professor no longer encourages individual thought, but a group consensus on the
handling of a particular issue. However, when the ultimate goal is consensus,
the patterned thought of selecting some perspectives and rejecting others
breeds unilateral agreement, or the same conclusion given by multiple hosts –
which by definition is plagiarism. So the patterned syllabi encourage plagiarism
of thought but hope to somehow sift and select those who plagiarize in words?
Why is this celebrated in academia? It appears that science has infiltrated the
humanities. The goal of the professor is to replicate the patterned thought to
validate his perspective. When the syllabus is organized in such a way as to
encourage specific steps of learning and limit perspectives, it becomes a
self-fulfilling paradox of unoriginal thought.
“However, it
is respectfully submitted that the operative fact is not whether the Turnitin
system is foolproof, but whether it is contrary to the public interest because
it actually encourages plagiarism.” –Appellants Petition for Rehearing, Robert Vanderhye, Esquire
David E Harrington, in an article for the Economist,
thinks the use of such software deters teachers from looking for plagiarism,
thinking it will naturally be picked up by other sources. For the student who
lacks literary skills, the professor has already determined to abandon them to
an unfeeling, unwavering courtroom of computer opinion – one where the student
is guilty until proven innocent. Just as Mike Smit objects to the presumption
of guilt, the under skilled student has no recourse for their own lack, even
though the public university is the very place that should be designed to help
that student improve in all intellectual areas. Instead, that student is hung
out to dry, left as collateral damage along the pathway to better academic
conformity. Since when did the university become all about universal thinking?
Why is it so important that the professor not
abdicate his role as reviewer? Look to another cultural example: How well has
spell-check increased grammatical accuracy in the vernacular? Writers and
bloggers no longer review their own work for error – that’s the job of the
computer program (in this case, spell-check). It’s a way of using unproven
science to shirk responsibility and lighten our workload. And it produces the
very opposite of what it is intended to grow: an absence of original thought.
What is wrong with the use of the scientific method
here? There is no ‘control’. There is no
group of students who examine the same coursework and subject matter within a
world where only the teacher is the ultimate judge of plagiarism. The honor
code could be doing more to instill academic integrity and discourage
plagiarism, but the college that enforces all students to submit work to
TurnItIn has eliminated the control of that variable. When you eliminate the
possibility of a control group coming to similar conclusions from varied
sources, you undermine the scientific method. This undermining is seen as
desirable, for what humanities professor wants to guide the patterns of student
thought based on science? Yet the use of data driven solutions to a very real
problem means that science has already forced its way in. Therefore, science in
its entirety should be enforced to protect the rationality of the experiment.
The idea that we should be of one thought and one
mind is not a synthesis of ideas, but a guided meditation on ideas already
constructed. This is not freedom of thought, this is tyranny in the mental
sphere. If students who offer varied perspective to the discussion are not
welcomed, the result is a shared mind not unlike zombies. The professor is
doing the thinking for you. The point you need to arrive at has already been
scripted out. And the plagiarism software is a way of hiding the overall goal
of patterned thinking by masking the universal thought with uncommon phrasing.
All must arrive at the same point, but with different styles and approaches.
We quickly embrace what we can do that we don’t stop to think of what we should do. The response by the University of Arizona was to add a
legal disclaimer to classes, rather than to examine the implications of whether
they want to be tied to the controversial software and copyright infringement
implications. Does an institute of higher education wish to purport the ideal
that all student work is an extension of the university’s intellectual
property? This is different from the private sector, or is it? Patents in the
private sector fall back on the company that provided the research space,
collaborative environment, and raw data that support the creative thought.
Should every university, as part of admission requirements, stipulate that no
intellectual property is totally belonging to the student? What about doctoral
theses? A doctoral student has full rights to the usage of their intellectual
property, as long as the doctoral board does not cut corners and hire a
software algorithm to do the hard work for them? And would this policy attract
the best and brightest? Or repel them?
“Ultimately,
I want a policy that respects students, respects our intellectual copyright,
and respects that many of us work hard at university.”
– Mike Smit
Students should be reassured that they will retain
rights to the original and creative work. But could they also benefit from the
future use of their work within a database created to catch plagiarists? How
would it work to give money to those authors who submit to TurnItIn for
copyrights? Each time a plagiarized work gets flagged, a few pennies go to the
original author as a sort of ‘thank you’ for giving their work to TurnItIn?
What about the pure coincidence factor? Where a work is not actually plagiarized,
but closely correlates to a newly submitted work? And then there is potential
for manipulation, where authors wishing to make a profit turn in multiple
sources of work, only so future writings will be flagged and the author
compensated for contributing to catching a plagiarizer – even the very same
author himself? The software has not proven to be free from manipulation,
either from the real plagiarists who wish to skirt the system (and will find
ways how), and the self-interest of the user who simply wants another forum for
their budding body of work. What about those who have already breached the
system, and access previously submitted work to the database and submit it to
various cheat sites for money? Isn't that considered as theft and plagiarism
within a system that makes no promises to protect original work? TurnItIn is
not encouraging original thought within the system it has devised. So it begs
the question, are schools who use TurnItIn getting what they pay for?
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