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

  Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient

For all of my diligence inside an IRB system, however, I'm not sure that we teachers (let alone students) are educated enough about what is ethically involved when we allow that external thing "that can think for itself" to scan and warehouse students' written work. Consent is all very well when an institution forms a figurative protective dome over its researchers and researched, but we cannot deny the fact that Turnitin.com is, indeed, a kind of reciprocal outsourcing.

While we are using the labors of the software, it is using the work of students to build its business. I'm not sure that students would want to give their "consent" for that (unless they were getting paid for it). And though the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) intends to protect students' educational records (which includes written papers), that protection seems only to pertain to those papers that have been "officially" graded. It does not clearly specify protection for ungraded writing (and Turnitin.com even acknowledges this fact in their "Legal" discussion).

And, no, it's not enough to put the uploading in the hands of students (see murky power dynamic addressed in the first section) and assume that they've done so willingly and knowledgably. Though one answer may be to ask students to sign an agreement that informs them of their rights and asks them to give their consent to have their work uploaded (by them or by their professors), their "consent" still involves the issue of guilt before innocence, and leaves me continuing to wonder about the problematic intersection of power, ownership and the tricky "business" of cheating. I shudder at the prospect of such toxic mistrusting perceptions of students infiltrating our writing (or any) classrooms.

I wonder, too, how many students would happily comply with submitting their work to Turnitin.com after we honestly informed them about the blurry lines of legality concerning their Intellectual Property Rights and the commodification of their compositions, or after they read some of the literature already out there (including the piece we've compiled here). Without that information clearly and honestly provided to them, aren't we engaging an underhanded, dishonest pedagogy? Aren't we, too, guilty of misrepresentation?

• Introduction
  Michael Donnelly
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
  Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
  Tracy Ann Morse
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
  Joanna Castner Post
• Conclusion

• 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