AU has taken steps to ensure student work is not saved on the plagiarism-checking site Turnitin’s database.
Turnitin is a text-matching database. Students can upload essays where they can be compared against online sources and the work of other students. The site’s most common use is as a detection tool that compares submitted work to a database of papers in order to catch plagiarism.
AU has made it part of its licensing policy to disable student work from being assimilated into Turnitin’s database, according to Meg Weekes, the associate dean of the School of Public Affairs. Turnitin has the capacity to store student work in order to enlarge the site’s range of detection.
Other schools allow Turnitin to keep their students’ work to help increase the site’s database, but the policy raises the question of whether this practice is fair use of intellectual property.
“We made an arrangement with the previous provost to make sure that we protected our students’ privacy, and make sure that none of their work would be retained permanently,” Weekes said.
All schools except the College of Arts and Sciences have used the site since 2007, according to Weekes.
“We use the site in order to help teachers with their evaluations and to help students to make improvements in their writing, in their research and their responsible application of information,” Weekes said. “We do all of this to help them learn to create their own work.”
Professors who create class accounts can also customize the site’s features in a variety of ways. Many use the site as a tool to encourage original writing and proper research methods.
“Turnitin is not a substitute for thinking and analysis,” Weekes said.
School of Communication Professor Rania Razek said she does not use the website, but favored using professor discretion for Turnitin.
“If they can establish class accounts with settings that would allow for the protection of copyright,” Razek said, “I would say leave it to the professors to the decide whether they use the site to evaluate academic integrity.”
Staff Writer Heather Mongilio contributed to the story.
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