DIGITAL MEDIA CULTURES

Digital media cultures

Legal and Ethical Implications of Turnitin

Introduction

Technologically-assisted academic dishonesty has rightfully attracted much attention among educators over the past decade as new technologies emerge that enable students to get over by using them to short-cut the effort normally associated with passing courses. Technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, programmable calculators, pagers and Ipods are luring students away from often arduous academic work and toward the easy path to success. One of the most serious problems is student plagiarism on term papers (Van Dusen, William R., Jr. 2004). Plagarism detection was the impetus behind the creation of Turnitin.com, just one of the many technologies designed to counteract this phenomenon. Turnitin was designed as a brake against the rising incidents of technologically-enhanced academic dishonesty such as buying papers outright on cheat sites,essay mills, copying and pasting the majority of a paper's content from online sources, or simply re-using papers previously submitted (either by themselves or by other students). Without the aid of an electronic database with which professors could compare papers, challenging the originality of a paper could be a very difficult endeavor. Below, I first present an overview of using Turnitin.com, and then I present an argument that examines the implications of using such a system.

Analysis

Some of the controversy surrounding the use of Turnitin lies in the very nature of the service. By storing the uploaded papers in order to expand its database for comparison to new submissions, Turnitin is potentially violating the students ' copyrights and right to privacy. By enlarging the database Turnitin can offer a more comprehensive search of documents, making their service more valuable, without offering compensation to the students whose intellectual properties make up that database. This practice presents some rather interesting legal and ethical issues (UCLA Registrar. 2006).

First, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, (FERPA), is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. Under FERPA, student records include: written documents, computer media, microfilm and microfiche, video or audio tapes or CDs, film, and photographs (Van Dusen 2004). Any record that contains personally identifiable information that is directly related to the student is an educational record under FERPA (UCLA Library. 2006). FERPA prohibits the dissemination, or use, of student records without the express written consent of the student. When Turnitin copies, or makes a digital fingerprint (as they call it), of the student paper in its entirety to its database it potentially violates student rights under FERPA. Often, instructors submit the students ' papers for plagiarism checks without the knowledge or consent of the students, which is potentially a violation of the students ' privacy. Many instructors sidestep this potential violation by having their students upload their own papers, which can be seen as the student giving tacit permission to the service to copy and use their intellectual property (Turnitin.com. 2006b).

However, when an instructor makes submitting the papers directly to Turnitin a mandatory requirement of the class the student has no choice ...