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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.

For the discussion with your professor I would personally recommend you cover at least the following points:

• ineffectiveness of service
• deprivation of marketability
• chilling effect on free expression
• USA PATRIOT Act implications

All of which have been briefly summarized in my previous entry regarding Turnitin.

The ineffectiveness of service may be hard to argue, but especially compelling if the point is communicated across. The basis for your argument should be that due to Turnitin’s extraordinarily large database of works of all kinds of quality and originality, it is prone to produce large amounts of false positives. Even where a student’s idea is completely original, there may still be many others who have already came up with the same idea completely originally. This in turn creates more work for the teaching staff, who now have to verify each instance of alleged plagiarism, most of which are false positives.

A probable counter argument appeals to statistics regarding the effectiveness of Turnitin.com. It is easily refuted by noting the fact that the statistics only take into account those who have been caught, and leaves an uncertainty as to how many have not been caught by the service.

The basis for a deprivation of marketability argument should mainly revolve around the two most straight forward points: future non-academic reuse of a work, and third party stealing of marketable ideas. For the former, note that any future, legitimate uses of a work will be hindered if it is submitted again to Turnitin.com, as it will return a 100% probability of plagiarism, or close to. For the latter, note that anyone who request, and is granted access to a work containing marketable ideas may steal said ideas to make a profit for oneself. Note also that Google was originally conceived of in a university paper by Larry Page.

Combining the consequences of the first two points allows a third argument to be made, due to the relatively higher probability of repeated original ideas in a topic of wide interest, a student may choose not to write a paper on this interest, instead choosing a topic of less interest to the student, but with relatively lower probability of repeated original ideas. Due to the fear of someone else stealing marketable ideas from a paper, a student may choose not to present that idea as an assignment, instead settling for an inferior idea. Both these behaviours constitute not only a form of self censorship, it also degrades the potential quality of a student’s work from what could have been had the student written on a subject of interest, or presented the marketable idea. This unfairly detriments the student’s academic achievement. Combined, these concerns create a chilling effect on the student body.

Finally, a mention of the USA PATRIOT Act must be included, since it is the only concern about Turnitin which does not involve some kind of fault on the part of the professor or the university. Several points to be mentioned may include the virtually unchecked powers of the US government to access data of any kind within its jurisdiction, and the willingness of the executive branch to break what little laws in existence in the process of spying on both its own and other nations’ citizens, as can be demonstrated by the AT&T warrantless wiretapping case. Note that to require all works be submitted to Turnitin.com jeopardizes student’s privacy and possibly mobility (ability to travel) and even personal safety, if a work is to the distaste of any three letter agency (ie. CIA, FBI, NSA, etc).

I would also highly recommend bringing up the various legal issues with regards to intellectual property and contract validity, however, it will require at least a basic understanding of and comfort with the law and the legal system, especially in the areas listed above. Also keep in mind not to make empty promises, including threats which you cannot feasibly pursue.

That is all for now, try this advice, it may just exempt you from Turnitin.com before it is officially banned.