Comment by Zev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zev | Hacker News Reader

My college has used TurnItIn for (at least) a few years now. At least, some departments do. I've only had to take one class that used it, Introduction to Psychology.

I went and spoke to the professor about this, asking if I could email her the paper, rather than using this service. She said that if it was up to her, I could but it wasn't and I would have to talk to the head of the department. I went and spoke to the head of the department and she accused me of wanting to cheat, due to my objections to the policy. I pointed out that I objected to the service keeping the rights to my paper to use for checking against anyone else's paper. She all but said that she didn't care and that my choices were to use the service or to fail the class -- it was too late in the semester to drop the class without approval from the dean.

I ended up using the service, I was a freshman and didn't want to fail the class. Especially not so late in the semester. At the top of each paper was a notice saying that the work was copyrighted to myself and that I didn't give TurnItIn permission to use it. I doubt the service noticed, it is automated, after all.

I've since made a point to ask every professor in a class where I would have to write a paper if the department uses such a service. They've all said basically the same thing: "We don't use that service, don't worry," and one even mentioned the concerns I had as a reason why they didn't want to use it either.

What ownership claims does the service take over your work? Is it simply to hold a copy to check for future plagiarism, or is it some larger copyright claim?

My wife employs some rudimentary checks for cheating in her classes (accounting). Simply checking the author field in excel documents turns up a cheating rate in the 15% range. I'm actually rather shocked (and alarmed) that so few professors apparently choose to use these services. They absolutely should. As a student, I'd demand that they do. After all, kids coasting through college only serve to damage your degree.

As to what the service does, please see my response to kenjackson for a bit more on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741731

I dislike the accusation and assumption that I'm going to cheat. I resent the fact that by voicing an opinion on the matter, I was accused of having a desire to cheat. I loathe being accused of lying because of someone else's actions. Especially when I've never met, encountered or so much as heard of this person before. And in my experience, using TurnItIn implies all of the above.

When it came to talking about the paper and research, every professor started off by talking about academic trust, don't plagiarize and so on. It seems hollow to follow that with "Okay. Now that thats said, I don't personally believe any of it. I think that you're all liars and cheats. So, you have to use this service."

No one is accusing you of cheating. Do you refuse to let professors grade your papers, because if they do they're implying that you have gotten every question wrong?

And any professor who talks about academic trust is someone you should avoid, because they're lying. Part of academia is about verification and refutation. If you can't validate work, you don't believe it. Now it may be the case that you choose not to validate it, maybe due to trust of the author, but that trust has been gained not something granted to all academics.

No one is accusing you of cheating. Do you refuse to let professors grade your papers, because if they do they're implying that you have gotten every question wrong?

Well, the head of the department all but accused me of cheating because I went and spoke to her about the use of TurnItIn. If I had to guess, I'd say that the only reason she didn't do so outright was because I hadn't turned in (or written, at that) anything yet. Nor is it like I refused to have my work graded; I tried to find alternate methods of handing my work in.

And any professor who talks about academic trust is someone you should avoid, because they're lying. Part of academia is about verification and refutation. If you can't validate work, you don't believe it. Now it may be the case that you choose not to validate it, maybe due to trust of the author, but that trust has been gained not something granted to all academics.

"Academic Trust" is usually mentioned in the context of "school policy" and something thats required on the syllabus. I've never had a professor say "Well, I trust you. You don't have to use any sources." (However nice that would be.)

I'm not saying to not verify or validate the work. I am saying that if I take the time to cite my sources in whatever format the professor specifies, the professor should be able to determine if I plagiarized or not on their own. Really now, if someone doesn't cite their work, that should be a giveaway that there is a potential problem.

And honestly, for undergraduate work, the issue of validation isn't exactly going to be important. An overwhelmingly large majority of the time, no original research is being conducted.

"I am saying that if I take the time to cite my sources in whatever format the professor specifies, the professor should be able to determine if I plagiarized or not on their own. Really now, if someone doesn't cite their work, that should be a giveaway that there is a potential problem."

Do you expect people who plagiarize to site: "Cheap A+ Essays" in their references? No, you buy an essay from an essay mill. Change a few things here and there to make it fit for the class, and turn it in.

You actually expect the professor to subscribe to every essay service in the world? If I was a professor the only way I could deal with this problem is to write a program that catalogued all essays from this service and do some type of text match against them. Essentially I'd write TurnItIn, but as a "theoretical" History professor with no programming skills, this is probably not easy.

I just don't get how students expect professors to actually detect plagiarism in most cases otherwise.

I used to grade papers in high school of my peers and while I could often spot cheating, I could almost never prove it. How did I spot cheating? I could often tell from within the context of a single paper the writing goes from horrible to exceptionally good.and then back to horrible. Likewise, I'd sometimes get 2 or 3 really poor papers and then get a paper where the student is John Hawkes. In the first couple of papers, no citations or horrible citations. In this paper the citations are perfect, page numbers, referencing hard to find journals and the whole nine. But yet, you're still often left with your hands tied.

How people actually cheat is beyond me; I've never had the inclination to do so.

I do expect the papers to be read by a real person. And in the case you described, that should be enough for the professor to call the student in and talk to them. Whats the difference between a person going "I think you're plagiarizing" and a machine doing the same? Besides a machine doing it faster.

Keep in mind what my objection is here: the storage and use of my works, not the service itself. Why can't TurnItIn do what you suggested (perhaps in a sarcastic manner) and subscribe to these services instead?

> I dislike the accusation and assumption that I'm going to cheat.

They aren't assuming that YOU are going to cheat. They are assuming that SOME students are going to cheat.

They're assuming that someone will be cheating. They're not ruling anyone out. To me, they're implying to everyone (not just me) you may be cheating.

What is your concern with TurnItIn using your paper? Is it just some arbitrary thing you have against the service or were you caught cheating with it in the past or something else? Just seems random to me.

Just to get this out of the way: I would rather fail a class than cheat. We don't know each other, so you might not believe me. But, thats my personal belief.

This dislike isn't arbitrary. My problem is that I wrote the paper. I don't want a third party to be able to use it to their own monetary gain without my permission. Being forced to do so left a bad taste in my mouth. When I tried to get in touch with TurnItIn to express my concerns, I didn't receive any response.

I can see the counterargument in your head already -- "But you use Google, don't you? How about Amazon and hundreds of other services that keep information about you." To which, I respond that I'm not signed into Google (prefer Bing or Duck Duck Go, at that) do not use Facebook and find Amazon's recommendations useful enough that it doesn't bother me. And I chose to use the rest of the services.

These companies also make their privacy policy and what they do with the information clear. With TurnItIn, the privacy issue wasn't clear when I looked. Would they ever sell the database? If they did, would they make a reasonable effort to protect my information? I was turning in a paper with my name and email address on it, after all. Tied directly to my college information, at that.

"I don't want a third party to be able to use it to their own monetary gain without my permission."

While I can appreciate the sentiment, that's not the law. I think Fair Use must apply when we're the content providers, just as much as when its Viacom.

With that said, your approach is probably the right one for you: avoid classes/teachers that use it. Personally, I don't mind, although anyone who would actually copy one of my papers has bigger academic problems than plagiarism.

My (non-lawyer) understanding is that fair use doesn't apply because this is a for-profit situations.

That's not true. Wikipedia lists this under "Common Misunderstandings" of Fair Use: "If you're selling for profit, it's not fair use. While commercial copying for profit work may make it harder to qualify as fair use, it does not make it impossible. For instance, in the 2 Live Crew Oh, Pretty Woman case, it was ruled that commercial parody can be fair use."

Companies like Kinko's also operate under Fair Use (when you're making a copy of a page from a book).

Keeping an exact and full copy of my work without any modifications pretty much rules out the possibility of a parody. And TurnItIn isn't doing any sort of creative work with it (musical or otherwise).

Unless you're saying my work is a parody of itself? In which case, its still my work. And they're still not doing any creative work with it. An algorithm can be creative, but applying it over and over is not.

Federal Appeals Court Judges, who know US law pretty well, disagree with your assessment of US law: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/headline-her...

And it was unanimous.

Like I said: Not a lawyer.

First, TurnItIn required students to enter into a "binding agreement" when they uploaded papers to the site.

Being forced to agree to the terms doesn't make them okay. It just means that I didn't want to fail and didn't have any other choice.

Second, TurnItIn's use was "fair" according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the "transformative" nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.

I wonder if any weight could be given to the argument that in order to be checked, the paper is implicitly given a second use, to verify plagiarism -- not that the checking process itself is transformative itself. And if that is true, would the only reason it is okay is due to the first reason? But, like I said, not a lawyer. And not about to find one to appeal this case.

You should read the actual ruling if you want details, but the two issues you mention are unrelated.

Here's what the actual ruling said on the second issue: "Second, the court determined that iParadigms’ use of each of the plaintiffs’ written submissions qualified as a "fair use" under 17 U.S.C. § 107 and, therefore, did not constitute infringement. In particular, the court found that the use was transformative because its purpose was to prevent plagiarism by comparative use, and that iParadigms’ use of the student works did not impair the market value for high school term papers and other such works".

And it goes into detail about how their use satisfies the standard pillars of fair use.

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