FSU Voice

Issue date: 11/4/06 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: FSU Staff

There is a thief among us at Fayetteville State University. This thief has successfully stolen thousands of term papers from students at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the world. The worst part is, this thief gets paid by us to do it.
It starts at college and university conferences, where hundreds of private companies try to sell products to educational institutions that will help them perform their jobs better. One of these private companies is Turnitin.com (www.turnitin.com) that has successfully beat out the competition and has convinced universities that their anti-plagiarism technology will enable professors and teachers to more easily detect plagiarized work when it has been used by students.
The fee for Turnitin.com can range from $1,000 to $10,000, depending on the size of the student body at each college or university. This means Fayetteville State University is using part of our annual tuition towards this, allowing professors to check our work for plagiarism, and in turn becoming enablers of corporate plagiarism themselves.
A graduate student, John Barrie, who also founded Plagiarism.org, founded Turnitin.com. He explains that his anti-plagiarism technology is called "document source analysis, which uses a set of powerful algorithms to make a digital fingerprint of any text document and then compare it against millions of other sources on the internet." "cataloging and indexing online academic works with automated robots" from participating sources compiles their database. Did you just catch that? The little misnomer that was just used in that last sentence called "participating sources?" These participating sources are the students of Fayetteville State University and all other campus bodies that are forced to use Turnitin.com in the classroom. While it is true that Turnitin.com uses sources from the internet in order to pinpoint when a student is plagiarizing, they get a lot of their database product from you and me. This is because every time a teacher makes you submit your work to this site, the site then keeps it.
In case this has all gotten too confusing, let's review. Colleges and universities pay an annual fee for the use of Turnitin.com, the faculty of these schools then force students to submit work to this site, and then this site keeps the submitted work in their database to use later in comparing it against future submitted work. Then this site charges another annual fee to the school, and can even increase this fee, due to the fact that it now has even more sources to search through. It sounds like Turnitin.com is making money off of our work. Isn't that the exact definition of plagiarism?

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