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

  Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
   by Anne Meade Stockdell-Giesler

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (2005), grad. student "Michael Thompson" (a pseudonym) confesses to having plagiarized a portion of his dissertation as he makes the case that plagiarism is common, easy, and rampant in academia today (p. B5). This belief is upheld at the university where we (the authors) are employed as evidenced by its programmatic adoption of the anti-plagiarism software from Turnitin. A 2000 Gallup poll cited during the presentation that introduced faculty to the software notes that Americans believe that "the top two problems facing the country today are education and a decline in ethics" (Wertz and Matulich 2004).

In fact, this loss of ethics in academia may be the cause of the rise in plagiarism. Turnitin would be, it seemed, our faculty's panacea to this national loss of ethics as reflected in our student population. After my own trial of Turnitin's Plagiarism Prevention software, however, I have come to believe that internet software as a policing agent is in no way an effective means to instill academic ethics, and may well undermine our effort to do so. My concerns are with the rhetorical messages sent both by the administration and by me in the subscription and use of this software product.

In the fall of 2005 I decided to require that my students use Turnitin.com. Having always relied on the process-oriented nature of composition pedagogy to prevent and catch plagiarists, I wanted to find out what effect, if any, using Turnitin would have on the ethical, philosophical, and pedagogical composition of my classroom. Turnitin's home page lauds its products as "recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention" and claims to "promote originality in student work, improve student writing and research skills, encourage collaborative learning, and save valuable instructor time" (Turnitin.com).

The administration, however, for reasons which I am unaware, chose only to subscribe to the Plagiarism Prevention software and eschewed the complementary products such as the Peer Review system. By opting to subscribe only to the policing product offered at the Turnitin.com website, I am concerned that the administration sent a number of undesirable (and perhaps unintentional) messages to the faculty, the most important of which may be that they placed a higher value on catching and punishing students who plagiarized than they did any other technological advances offered by this company.

This message placed all the focus on the students' end-products. This focus is antithetical to the university's own stated philosophical emphasis on process-centered writing as a means of intellectual growth; thus it seems that, as users of this software, we are guilty of talking out of both sides of our mouths (1).

• 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