by:
  Michael Donnelly,
  Rebecca Ingalls,
  Tracy Ann Morse,
  Joanna Castner, and
  Anne Meade
  Stockdell-Giesler

  Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
   by Rebecca Ingalls

The fragmented array of emotions (guilt, anger, resentment, hurt, vengefulness, relief, violation) that have arisen from our (the authors) informal discussions of students' plagiaristic acts and the ethics of policing them by using Turnitin.com are a testament to the human complexities of trying to engage honest, rigorous pedagogy in an easy-access technological world where students are perhaps more tempted than ever to engage their own work by way of less-than-honest, less-than-rigorous means. This treacherous ether of cyberspace, in many ways, has reconstructed our perceptions of students before they settle into their chairs and pick up their pens on the first day of class.

But, as Matthew Willen, in his article "Reflections on the Cultural Climate of Plagiarism" (2004), suggests, "plagiarism is certainly not a new phenomenon," despite its increasing visibility, thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web (p. 55). Rather, argues Willen, students often resort to cheating because they are struggling to "compet[e] for opportunities for the success myth that are more limited than they were at other times in the past" and therefore succumb to the anxiety involved by stealing their work in order to earn the necessary "results" (p. 56). In other words, students are vying for spots in their learning and working lives that encourage them to attend more to "product" than to the integrity of the "process" (p. 57).

Willen argues for a solution-approach that takes into account multiple factors: "value of learning," "campus ethos" and "consequences of decisions" (p. 57-58), which seems ideal. I fear the reality, however, is that schools may be more inclined to go the "consequences" route. Whether or not we are willing to agree that times are tougher for students nowadays in terms of their ability to walk steadily the line between original and unoriginal composition, we must acknowledge that the utilization of online resources like Turnitin.com aims to police from the outside-in, rather than educate from the inside-out.

James P. Purdy (2005) has argued, "Instructors using plagiarism detection technology…seek to make visible students' acts of transgression. The goal here is far from pedagogical" (p. 277). In other words, in treating the symptoms rather than the cause(s) - the crime of plagiarism, rather than the reasons why the student may have plagiarized in the first place - we lose the opportunity to teach about why plagiarism is wrong.

• Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
• Flying, Finally
• The Role of the WPA
• The Problems with PDS
• May the Conversation Continue...
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
• The Devaluing of Growth?
• A Lack of Ethics
• An Ethos of Academic Integrity
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
• The Concept of Intellectual Property
• Roots of Consent
• Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
• Responsibility for Writing
• A Focus on Revision
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
• Skill and Creativity
• Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
• A Stimulus to Creativity
• Engagement and Success
• Conclusion
• References
• print version