Ultimately, this was no solution at all, since it meant that the current policy would be changed to exclude junior and seniors from the mandate only temporarily after those two groups graduated, the policy would be reinstated, offering a kind of “grandfather clause” to the older students, but no consolation to those students who would come after. School officials responded to the petition by easing (but not removing) the mandate: instead of having all students in all grades submit their work to Turnitin, only 9th and 10th grade English and social studies classes would be required to use the service. The petition, which garnered 1,190 student signatures of the approximately 1800 students that attend the school, requested that the mandate to submit work to Turnitin be removed and that an “opt-out” option be allowed (2). The events that led up to the eventual filing of the lawsuit in March 2007 began in September of 2006, when a group of students at McLean High School circulated a petition to oppose the mandatory submission of their work to a newly adopted (2). Ultimately, the McGill University Senate decided “in favor of each student’s right to have their papers graded without running them through the Turnitin database” (2).
In at least one of the cases, the student received failing grades for his work just because he refused to submit his assignments to Turnitin. In 20, two McGill University students refused to submit their work to the Turnitin database in classes that mandated their using the service (2). Though the March 2007 filing is the first lawsuit in the United States to be brought against Turnitin, it is not the first time students have expressed concern with the plagiarism detection software. It will be impossible in such short space to provide the kind of depth and breadth of research that a subject like this demands for that reason, I have provided an additional list of references which should serve as a solid starting point for further inquiry. In the following brief report, I will describe the context and motivation for the 2007 lawsuit, the details and central points of debate surrounding the case, and the implications that the case has for the rhetoric and composition classroom. In the years since, has continued to grow and evolve, and is now recognized around the world as Turnitin and iThenticate, the internet’s most widely used and trusted resources for preventing the spread of internet plagiarism. Encouraged by a high level of interest from their peers, the researchers teamed with a group of teachers, mathematicians, and computer scientists to form, the world’s first internet-based plagiarism detection service.
Turnitin comn series#
IParadigms, the company behind Turnitin got its start in 1996, when a group of researchers at UC Berkeley created a series of computer programs to monitor the recycling of research papers in their large undergraduate classes. (“turn it in”) is a for-profit service used by over 6,000 academic institutions in 90 countries (1). In March 2007, two students at McLean High School in McLean, Virginia along with two students at Desert Vista High School in Phoenix, Arizona filed a lawsuit against, a California company hired by their respective schools to aid in the fight against plagiarism. Zimmerman (Pipkins), James Madison University