Correction: I believe it's suppose to be Innocent Until Proven Guilty. Although this is right (you are innocent until proven guilty in the Canadian Law system), it is not the case when it comes to the school system at many universities (apparently it must say that in the fine print). It wasn't until learning about it in lecture that I realized we do not own the righs to our work submitted to Turnitin.com. Many university students face this frightening procedure every year, normally just in the begining years, as teachers assume that with large classes, someone will have copied or plagiarised someone else's work, whether it be their classmates or a theorist. Not only does this site claim ownership over the student's work, but is criminaling students based on software that picks out similarities between their work and others. This concept of having similar work as others seems unavoidable when writing about the same topics millions of others have written about as well. My point in this blog however is not to judge the operations of the system, rather to note thats its use criminalizing students.
An interesting side note is that Turnitin.com has too joined the blogosphere. In their most current blog post they are posting comments about accusations that have been made against them and providing corrections, (or excuses) to the remarks. I found that many of the comments they decided to emphasize on correcting are of common sense to the average person. Although I'm sure answering these questions would be easier than answering more important questions about the accuracy and quality of their software. Definitely check out their blog that it is fairly interesting...
Now back to my focal concern with Turnitin.com. I feel that univeristies need to realize how insulting this program is for their students. An application like this truly conveys the level of trust between professors and their students. As university bound students it's evident that we are hardworking, dedicated and honest students. We have given no reason to assumed otherwise. Especially in senior courses when prof's ask things to be "turn in" to Turnitin.com its complete discrimination. By doing this they are saying that perhaps the only way we made it to say 3rd year was by cheating and assume we would do so again. Not only is it degrading to us but for students like Mike Lazaridis (the founder of Research in Motion) his idea of the Blackberry could have been alot more difficult to claim ownership had the University of Waterloo, Ontario made him submit his paper about the Blackberry to Turnitin.com . I'm more curious now to hear your thoughts on Turnitin. Is it fair to us to assume we will cheat? Do you have more dislike for the software used? or for the fact that the University spends tons of our tuition dollars on it yearly because they assume were criminals? And lastly do you think universities will ever change this system?
I'll leave you with a video I found describing Turnitin.com from both the professor side and a student's side. Read the comments on the video as well provides even more opinions.
And I also want to leave with you a couple of blogs about other people's opinions on Turnitin.com that might help formulate your ideas. The first is a blog called DetentionSlip.org about two students in Virgina who filed a law suit against Turnitin.com (I'm sure they're not the first) and the second is the blog Far From a Shining Star who feel similar to the way I do.
Enjoy guys!
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