Professors introduce Turnitin.com

By: Brian Hayden

Posted: 9/19/07

It was a mistake senior Nicole Pagano won't soon forget.

The Syracuse University broadcast journalism major was burning the midnight oil in the spring to finish her final paper for an S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications class called Critical Perspectives on News. Before submitting it to her professor, she checked its academic integrity on Turnitin.com, a resource then being tested in select SU classes.

The Web site told her that a section of the paper had been plagiarized. She had only cited the part, rather than quoting the passage verbatim. Having realized her mistake, she submitted a plagiarism-free paper to her professor.

"The Web site helps professors to hone in on kids who plagiarize," Pagano said. "It is kind of stupid for students to plagiarize these days because they will definitely get caught."

Pagano was part of the first group of SU classes to use the Web site, which checks for academic integrity. Her class was part of a pilot study at SU to determine whether Turnitin.com was an effective faculty resource.

The Office of Academic Integrity recently announced that with the pilot's success, the site would be available to all professors this year. Since its origins in the mid 1990s, Turnitin.com now compares sites to thousands of news articles, journals and periodicals, as well as other students' papers.

Even though the site's plagiarism search seems rather thorough, not every professor is thrilled.

Professor Rebecca Moore Howard in the writing program agreed with the motivation of the SU's effort to curb academic dishonesty and plagiarism, but she doesn't think Turnitin.com is an adequate solution.

The Web site only checks for the copying of words, she said, and not the paraphrasing of sentences and summarizing of ideas, which is another violation of academic integrity. She believes that those professors who will submit every student's paper are adopting a "guilty-until-proven innocent" attitude.

"The teachers need to engage with the students rather than having a machine do it," she said.

Howard said she believes more emphasis should be put on clarifying the citation process. She also says that when a professor submits a students' paper into a database, the site shouldn't be trusted in keeping the papers confidential.

"It takes a lot of faith to trust (Turnitin.com's) assurance," she said.

Still, Ruth Stein, interim director of the Office of Academic Integrity, said every paper submitted is confidential and cannot be printed out by anyone. She looks forward to its resourcefulness for professors and students.

"Some professors will not use it," Stein said. "Then they will get a suspicious paper. And that's when they will really want to use the site."

Professors can either submit the students' papers themselves to check for plagiarism or extend the resource to students to check their own work and prevent any plagiarism from occurring, Stein said.

Broadcast journalism professor Barbara Fought urged the university to adopt the site while she served as a member of the Vice Chancellor's Committee on Academic Integrity. She said the site allows her to spend less time checking for plagiarism and more time focusing on the actual substance of students' papers.

"Most students want to get their sourcing accurately. This is a helpful tool to make sure they source things appropriately," she said. "I don't look at it as Big Brother. I look at it as a big sister that can help you."