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Today is the second day of orientation, it was a very relaxed day, with many hours to kill between events. I decided to take advantage of that time and chat a little with Derrick Harder, current president of the Simon Fraser Student Society, who is also on the Senate, the Senate committee on Academic Integrity in Student Learning and Evaluation (SCAISLE), and the Board of Governors. The most relevant of which is SCAISLE, the committee is evaluating SFU’s Turnitin policy.

Of the various things that we discussed, I feel that everyone should know about the advice he gave regarding professors who currently employ Turnitin as an anti-plagiarism measure: If your professor requires its use, talk to him or her and tell them that you do not wish to submit your work to Turnitin.com. If they give you any trouble, refer him or her to Dr. Robert M. Gordon, who is a Professor of Criminology and chair of the SCAISLE.

…and if you do, I’ll sue you, and I’ll win.

That’s what I’ll be telling any professors I might have who require the use of Turnitin.com, and I encourage you to do the same.

Turnitin.com is a plagiarism detection service used by many universities around the world, including in British Columbia: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Northern British Columbia. In case you didn’t notice, that’s all the universities in the province.

I am not disputing the importance of academic honesty, in fact I agree wholeheartedly that plagiarism is a behaviour which cannot be allowed (honest students suffer from it after all). However using a service like Turnitin is not the proper method of enforcing said academic honesty. The service is built upon (and indeed thrives upon) immorality, hypocrisy, and likely illegality.