I became very concerned after reading Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel’s article “A Guide for Resisting Edtch: The Case Against Turnitin”, because they made me realize how unfair Turnitin’s business practices is. Turnitin is widely used in universities and colleges for detecting plagiarism in students’ writing. It does this by comparing student’s works to a database of previously submitted academic writings.
However, where the scam occurs is that most of the works in Turnitin’s database are works it acquired through its service. All the works students submit through Turnitin automatically become the company’s property, and thus part of its database. Students are essentially paying Turnitin to steal their work. Turnitin gets paid twice – by the students who are subscribing to submit their work to the database, and by the instructors who use that same database to look for plagiarism in the work submitted by their students. In a way, students are paying to both get caught for doing plagiarism, and to help their teachers catch their classmates doing plagiarism. It’s an especially evil form of plagiarism, when you think about it. The closest analogy I could think of is of pigs paying the butcher to slaughter them and their friends and family.
Another metaphor that came to me is the mafia. Turnitin acts like a protection racket, where people need to pay or else they will be hurt. In this case, students pay to subscribe to Turnitin in order to prove to their instructors that they are not plagiarizing. In most cases, students do not have the choice to opt out of paying to subscribe to Turnitin, or to have their work included in Turnitin’s database. To choose not to do so would automatically brand a student a plagiarist in the eyes of their school. I think it’s especially tragic because it makes it so that students are presumed guilty until proven innocent. This is opposite of how criminals are supposed to be treated by the justice system, so the fact that this is how colleges treat their students, who are their playing clients, means that colleges and universities treat their students worse than the criminal justice system treats suspected criminals.
I agree with Morris and Stommel’s call for action at the end. It is time for educators to critically examine the role Turnitin plays in today’s educational system. Students need to stop accepting the presence of Turnitin as a fact of life, and need to inform their instructors and school administrators that they are being victimized by the company, and that either Turnitin changes its business practices or lose the patronage of their school. Most importantly, teachers need to start teaching again, not just letting a big data company do their job for them at the cost of their students’ intellectual property.
Source: Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). A Guide for Resisting Edtech: The Case Against Turnitin. An Urgency of Teachers. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc. https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/a-guide-for-resisting-edtech-the-case-against-turnitin/