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

  The Problems with PDS

The impact of technologies makes these issues more complicated and therefore murkier, not clearer or simpler; they are therefore more pressing, not less. The institutionalization of such technologies, as on our campus, adds layers of complexity to those issues. Generally, the issues seem to me to fall into two categories: pedagogical and ethical.

The first asks what is taught (and/or not taught) through the use of PDS? Does it truly deter plagiarism? Does it make it easier for instructors to identify plagiarized papers? Does it make it too easy for instructors to deal with plagiarism without asking the hard questions about why students plagiarize and what we should do about it? Related to this is the problem that PDS tends to presume student guilt, breeding (or perhaps merely reflecting) a culture of suspicion and blame, and intensifying the divide between faculty and students; this is, of course, counter-productive in an educational context.

The second type of issue, the ethical, refers primarily to the intellectual property rights of students. PDS doesn't merely infringe on those rights, it simply ignores them. If the purpose of such software is to "protect" or "improve" or "increase" Academic Integrity, then we must ask difficult questions about the integrity of the software itself, of the ethics involved in simply appropriating the labor of students in order to sell a product. (For it is in fact a product-created, marketed, and purchased. Let's not forgot that.) This is even more pressing when faculty at colleges and universities across the country, including our own institution, are lobbying for better, clearer protection of their own Intellectual Property Rights.

Another of the major problems with institutionalizing Turnitin is that it tends to presume guilt, breeding a culture of suspicion and intensifying the divide between faculty and students. The main "purpose" of Turnitin, we are told, is that it "Deters plagiarism before it happens" (Wertz and Matulich 2004). Yet this seems to me misleading. First, it's similar in its approach to the "War on Drugs"-we'll prevent drug use by increased police presence in targeted areas, stiffer penalties for offenders, and more and more drug testing. Certainly there's lip service paid to "education," but the money goes to fund law enforcement and penalize drug users. And we've seen how successful that approach has been, which is to say, it hasn't.

Second, Turnitin searches only, in addition to "[m]illions of student papers already submitted to Turnitin since 1996," "[a] current and archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet (more than 4.5 billion pages indexed)" and "[m]illions of published works from ProQuest databases and The Gutenburg Collection of literary classics" (Wertz and Matulich 2004). This means, then, that Turnitin may deter certain forms of plagiarism - it does not search millions of student papers never turned in, or millions of other published works, including books and articles not available on the Internet. Nor would it necessarily deter students from having a peer or family member write a paper for them. It may instead merely encourage students to resort to more traditional forms of plagiarism, i.e., to do a better job of plagiarizing.

• 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
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