University website submission service poses some real ethical questions
As May began, both my brother and I started our online summer courses. Having vastly different educational goals, my brother is taking biomedical ethics and I am taking computers, information and society. His course, offered by Western, and my course, offered by York, are both posted online for students to complete at their own pace.
For my brother’s course, as for many university courses these days, the professor requires students to submit all assignments online through TurnItIn.
For those of you who have never heard of "Turnitin," this online service is purchased by participating educational institutions to check for academic dishonesty (AKA plagiarism). Students are asked, by their professor, to submit their written work directly to Turnitin instead of in person. By doing this, Turnitin can run the student’s work through their system to check for plagiarized material.
According to Turnitin, academic dishonesty is a serious problem both for secondary and post-secondary educational institutions alike. They cite U.S. studies that have shown that 80 per cent of college students admit to cheating at least once. Being a university student myself, I can attest to the fact that cheating is a problem in Canada too. Students will often take short cuts, like: re-wording paragraphs and failing to credit the original author; hiring essay writing services; as well as copying and pasting text from the internet directly into their essays. All of these situations occur, while some transgressions are more serious than others are.
On the surface, Turnitin seems like a reasonable solution to a serious epidemic. But, once the surface is scratched a number of ethical and legal problems are uncovered.
First, many argue Turnitin criminalizes average hard-working students. By requiring all students to submit essays through this system, the argument can be made that everyone is guilty until proven innocent. As far as I’m concerned, this argument is weak. We all agree to "protective measures" every day, like passing through metal detectors in airports, and anti-theft devices in retail stores. In this sense, Turnitin is no different.
There is a more convincing argument however. Turnitin stores a digital copy of all submitted essays in their database. These essays are then used by Turnitin for profit, to check other essays. Perhaps I’m alone here, but I think this is problematic. If students’ work is going to be used for profit, perhaps the students should get royalties?
But, it gets worse. In order to submit assignments through this system, (as required by their professor), one must sign up with Turnitin. By doing this, a student allows his/her essay to be used in this manner. But, realistically, does that student really have a choice? The answer to that is an unequivocal "no." Students who refuse to submit assignments to Turnitin find themselves in a legal battle, as one McGill student recently realized. Thus, I would argue that students agree to the terms, set out by Turnitin, under duress. Not only is this predicament unethical, it may even be illegal.
In all of this, one thing is for sure — academic dishonesty is a serious problem. While I believe Turnitin and participating schools have noble intentions, I find their methods questionable.
Finally, one must also realize that the very existence of Turnitin highlights a problem within our society as a whole. If students are under so much pressure that they are willing to sacrifice their integrity for the sole purpose of achieving a grade, I would argue that ideals of our society may be in jeopardy in the future.
Jay Solomon, is the Youth Coordinator of the Canadian Initiative for the Prevention of Bullying. Jay is currently at York University but has been speaking out against bullying and school violence for more than five years.