Faculty Academic Computing Support Services (FACSS) is considering subscribing the university, or at least specific colleges, to a Web-based plagiarism prevention system called Turnitin, according to Michael Morrison, faculty liaison and manager of faculty academic computing support services.

Should FACSS sign a license with Turnitin, both students and faculty members would be able to submit papers over the Internet for Turnitin to compare against published Web sites, electronic versions of published works and Turnitin’s own student paper database that it maintains on its server in the hopes of ferreting out plagiarized student papers.

‘We’re just now trying to assess whether this is something that we have enough interest in to sign a license campus-wide, or whether we want the departments that are really interested sign smaller licenses,’ Morrison said. ‘We’re going to be having some conversations with some faculty groups to determine whether this is something that they’re interested in.’

Those that have expressed an interest in signing a license with Turnitin include the College of Law and several individual faculty members in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Martin J. Whitman School of Management, Morrison said.

After submitting written work to the system, users would then receive an Originality Report showing where there are similarities between the paper and preexisting works, and the extent to which the paper is a duplicate. A search for a single paper can take from a few seconds up to a few hours, Morrison said, depending upon the length of the paper submitted.

One of the faculty members that has voiced interest in the subject of Turnitin is professor Mark Rupert of Maxwell, who said Turnitin ‘would be a very powerful tool for discouraging plagiarism.’

‘You can tell students they’re cheating themselves when they do that,’ he said, ‘but that’s really not enough.’

Rupert also says that fear of plagiarism influences his teaching.

‘I don’t especially like tests, and if I could have students write papers and be confident that it was actually their work in the paper, then I’d much prefer to go that route,’ he said.

If enough colleges, faculty or students express interest in the software, Morrison said, then it may be made available to the entire campus. Otherwise, smaller scale deals could be struck to provide the service to those who are interested.

The College of Information Studies already signed a license with Turnitin, making it available to all student and faculty members in Information Studies. Turnitin, in addition to curbing plagiarism, also allows students in the College of Information Studies to check whether they cited their sources correctly in their paper to avoid accusations of plagiarism, Morrison said.

‘It’s like a spell check almost, but it’s checking for citations,’ he said.

There is a barrier to signing a campus-wide licensing and usage of Turnitin, however, Morrison said.

‘There is some controversy around this in the sense that some students don’t want to have to submit their materials through a system like this, and it would be up to the individual faculty members to use it or not use it,’ Morrison said. ‘It would be another product that would be available for them to use.’

Published on October 7, 2004 at 12:00 pm