TurnItIn Provides a Valuable Service, But Jeopardizes Students' Rights

Realistically, if you're a professor who needs to ensure students aren't cheating on their papers, TurnItIn.com is a true time-saver with few alternatives. TurnItIn is a tremendous boon for professors who simply do not have time to painstakingly check their students' written work for plagiarism against the millions of other scholastic documents on the internet. In an insightful article published last month, one professor praises TurnItIn for its incredible efficiency and criticizes it for its monopolistic hold on students' original works.

The issue hinges on what TurnItIn does with all of those student papers it receives. It keeps them, archives them, and continues to use them for plagiarism checking. Whereas this is more of an issue in principle rather than reality, the fact remains that students are required to give over their intellectual products to a company that will use them to make a profit. Some may find that to be a bit unsettling, although there is no apparent harm that comes from it. After a 2007 lawsuit, a district court determined that TurnItIn is not breaking any copyright laws in their practices. Despite the fact that it is not technically unlawful, TurnItIn does influence the rights of students to be in control of their intellectual property.

As term papers, research manuscripts, and other long written assignments pile up, it is hard to argue against the benefits of using a site like TurnItIn to protect academic integrity and ensure the quality of students' educations. But there is a hidden cost of student ownership that, although practically innocuous (for now), may trouble the ethical constitutions of some.

Helping Students Cheat? - Frankly Fridays Discussion

Frankly Fridays

Frank Conversation about Faculty Issues

Friday, October 18^th, 9:30-10:30 AM, Osprey Commons Faculty Lounge (Building 16, 4^th Floor)

Topic: Helping Students Cheat?
Let us know you will be there: ofe@unf.edu

As the stakes become higher for college graduates to find jobs and make a living, and as employers are demanding that employees have college degrees, students are finding ways to accomplish this requirement without extreme effort or challenge. In fact, e-commerce has responded to this need and provided websites where students can hire others to take their classes for them (http://www.wetakeyourclass.com/). As institutions of higher education are pressured to demonstrate that students learn important skills from their college experience, the challenge of ensuring that the appropriate students receive the appropriate recognition for their work is becoming increasingly difficult.

In two essays, Chronicle contributor, James Lang, provides some perspective and advice about how faculty at institutions of higher education might be implementing procedures that make student cheating more likely (Part I, Part II, Part III). In this Frankly Friday session, we will discuss the current state of cheating at UNF and some ways to address the issue.

Come discuss how these issues impact UNF and faculty across the U.S.
We will meet in the Faculty Lounge on the 4^th floor of the new dining facility, Osprey Commons.
OFE will provide the coffee and pastries.

Let us know you will be there: ofe@unf.edu

Best regards,

Dan Richard

Pragmatism, Plagiarism, & Integrity - SOARS Event

Every year, students struggle with completing assignments, and the various demands on their time and effort can lead them to take short-cuts or even to cheat.

Especially at this time of year when large projects and writing assignments are due, faculty are faced with making decisions as to whether student submitted their own work or the work of someone else.

During the Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research & Scholarship (SOARS) conference on Friday, April 19^th, there will be a couple of events that will address these issues. One is a faculty-student forum at 11:45 - 1:00 in the Student Union Ballroom A-B (at the University of North Florida) on and the other, a Keynote Address by Dr. Donald L. McCabe, Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers University, titled Promoting Academic Integrity.
I encourage you to attend these worthwhile and engaging events.

Best,

Dan Richard

Pragmatism or Plagiarism? a SOARS Faculty-Student Forum

Moderator: Dr. Judith Ochrietor, Department of Biology

Panelists: Thomas J. Van Schoor, Student Ombudsman	Natalie Hofmann, OUR Research Fellow
Andrea McLeod, Assistant Registrar	Aaron Leedy, Faculty & Former Student
F. Dan Richard, Director, Office of Faculty Enhancement

During this interactive forum the audience will watch short vignettes in which students discuss writing papers revealing some of the questions, myths, and misperceptions about plagiarism. After each vignette, audience members will be invited to respond to questions about their perceptions of the students’ behavior using their cell phones. Results of these polls will be immediately displayed. The moderator will then help guide a discussion about the audience’s perceptions of the students’ writing approaches, whether or not the students’ approaches constitute plagiarism, and, if so, what the consequences should be. Members of the panel will serve as resources for audience participants by answering questions and clarifying UNF procedures and processes.

Keynote Address

Dr. Donald L. McCabe

Promoting Academic Integrity

Dr. McCabe is a Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers University. For more than twenty years he has done extensive research on college cheating, surveying over 250,000 students at more than 220 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. He has also surveyed over 40,000 high school students in the United States during the last ten to fifteen years. His work has been published widely in business, education, and sociology journals and he is founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of over 300 colleges and universities based at Clemson University. Members of this consortium are joined in a united effort to promote academic integrity among college and university students.

Dr. McCabe earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Princeton University (1966), an M.B.A. in Marketing from Seton Hall University (1970), and a Ph.D. in Management from New York University (1985). He worked for over 20 years in the corporate world before joining Rutgers University in 1988. His last corporate position was Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Devro, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company.

Have Money, Will Pass

As online education expands, students are finding ways to credential themselves without paying their academic dues -- by studying. Instead, students in online classes can pay an online service that will take their online courses for them. In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, Alexandra Tilsley discusses an old problem with a new face, cheating to make the grade, but in this case, the cheating is done by identity mimicking. This seems to be the latest in an arms race in which students to find ways to pass without studying and institutions of higher education find ways to promote integrity. Read more on the problem and what institutions are doing to deal with the new threat.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/21/sites-offering-take-courses-fee-pose-risk-online-ed

Plagiarism and Fraud in Research Grant Funding

A new research report published in Nature identifies several suspicious grant applications among those submitted to major granting agencies like NSF and NIH. The researchers used a text similarity detection program to search over 600,000 grant applications. Their analysis identified 167 duplicate grant pairs. The researchers then inspected the published reports from those grants and found that some researchers failed to include all grant funding in their report. This duplication resulted in millions of dollars being wasted on duplicate funding.

The conclusion from the analysis is that some researcher submit grants to multiple agencies and occasionally receive funding from both, for the same project. The authors recommend using this text-matching software by granting agencies to detect suspicious applications. Their hope is to reduce waste in government funding and provide more researchers with legitimate funding.

To read more and engage in a discussion with others, see the Chronicle article on the report.
http://chronicle.com/article/US-Said-to-Have-Wasted/136921
To read the original report, including tables of duplicate funding in different agencies, see the article published in Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7434/full/493599a.html

Income Inequality, Trust, and Academic Dishonesty

Is the growing problems with cheating in US colleges and universities related to economics? In a recent article, psychologists have observed a link between economic inequality in a state and the amount of cheating in that state (measured by the number of Google searches for "buy term papers" and national pay-for-paper websites). They suggest that the way to reduce academic dishonesty is to build trust between teachers and students, students and students, and within society as a whole. Read the summary of the research on the Association for Psychological Science website.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/income-inequality-and-distrust-foster-academic-dishonesty.html

Academic Integrity Exercise

Deborah Zarka Miller at Anderson University recently published an article about an assignment she uses to teach her students about plagiarism. Instead of having students engage in plagiarism or try to detect plagiarism, she has students become victims of plagiarism. She describes the activity in this recent article.
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/a-lesson-in-academic-integrity-as-students-feel-the-injustice-of-plagiarism/

Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com

A Rational Response to Plagiarism

A recent article in the Chronicle provided some helpful tips to individual instructors on how to think through and deal with plagiarism. Among the most helpful tips were:

1. Keep your priorities straight (don't make yourself the plagiarism police - you don't have time).
2. Make your policies clear (in your syllabus).
3. Don't make threats you cannot keep (do what you say you are going to do - don't overreach).
4. Make plagiarism difficult (by designing worthwhile assignments).

To see all of the recommendations, read the article online.