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Comment by syllogism | Hacker News Reader

Oh get real.

The university has the right to ask you to submit your work however they want as a condition to course completion. If you don't want to submit your work to turnitin you don't have to complete the course. Nobody's forcing you to.

If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do! It doesn't matter that selling your work to a paper mill is legal. It's against the interests of the institution, so they're not going to let you go through their programme and keep that right.

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And what about a required course in high school?

Sounds illegal under child labor laws, but IANAL

A thought experiment: in the USA, a minor's assets belong to the parents, right? So, ipso facto, the parent holds the copyright. What if the parent refuses to allow a copy to go to Turnitin?

Further, minors cannot enter into contracts. Would Turnitin's license agreement be a contract, and hence void since one of the parties was a minor?

> If the extent of your objection is that turnitin robs you of potential financial benefit of selling your work, then that's by design: that's exactly what the educational institution wants to do!

I know of no university that explicitly prohibits students from selling papers to paper mills (although I haven't checked). Prohibiting students from using papers from paper mills is a different thing entirely.

Seriously? I am 100% certain that selling papers for other students to use would have violated my university honor code. I would be surprised if there are any schools where that isn't the case.

Aiding cheating is against the honor code, however no one is going to say "sell me your paper so I may turn it in for a grade against the code".

Rather they'd say they want your paper so they can see your thoughts. That's fair because they could get the same effect from merely talking to you about your paper.

Or they'd say that its okay to use outside sources (such as your paper) so long as they cite it. This is also true in many cases.

And if they want your paper so they can "see your thoughts" (and pay you for the privilege!?), what's wrong with that paper also being entered into Turn It In? After all, you surely don't think they were lying about their intentions. Because if you suspect they are lying about their intentions, then aren't you aiding cheating?

Because in the future, you may want to sell that same paper to students after you've graduated.

In that case, you're not breaking any honor code although you're aiding others in being dishonorable to their own codes.

Well, actually you are still breaking the honor code even after you're graduated. Though the school would probably have little recourse against you in practice.

At least in my CSE program, you are not allowed to give anyone else the answers in any form. That includes talking about how you solved an assignment and it certainly includes sharing solutions for any purpose.

So then textbook and study guide authors are violating your schools honor code? Just because I took the time to increase the value of my study guide by specializing it for CS101 at UT, doesn't mean that I sold my guide for the express purpose of some idiot getting out of doing the work themselves.

I know I wouldn't risk selling a study guide that had anything in the same ballpark as answers to assignments.

Thanks to a quick google, here's my old student handbook: "Selling academic assignments. No person shall sell or offer for sale to any person enrolled at the University at Buffalo any academic assignment, or any inappropriate assistance in the preparation, research, or writing of any assignment, which the seller knows, or has reason to believe, is intended for submission in fulfillment of any course or academic program requirement."

On paper, universities disallow helping others cheat. In reality, it doesn't seem to be enforced.

If the helper student has already passed the class, the professor can't take disciplinary action against them without making a major case about it. It's easy to simply fail the cheating student or give them a zero on the assignment without making a record.

Additionally, if it is brought to a committee, it'd be much harder to prove.

So although it's officially not allowed, there's not much universities are doing to combat the providers.

I know at least my university does.

eli's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793351) prompted me to go and explicitly check my university's academic honour code, which does explicitly include language about selling assignments. While I maintain that there's a difference between selling a paper—i.e., your answers to an assignment—and selling the assignment yourself, I also concede that it's a hair-splitting one.

It looks like my understanding of the honour code is therefore definitely false for my university, and, from the evidence, probably for many others. (This is particularly embarrassing because I was part of the group that approved the final version of the code!)

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