From the Director
UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester urges instructors to assign more writing in all courses, not just Ws. Students need the practice, and writing will also help them engage more deeply with their subject matter.
UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester advises faculty to view online services such as Turnitin.com as just one component of a larger plan to discourage plagiarism. For more information on how writing instructors can foster academic integrity, see “Teaching Tips” on page 7.
This summer, Instructional Technology Services (ITS) advised Texas A&M University students to exclude identifying information on work submitted to Turnitin.com—the popular plagiarism detection service—because of privacy concerns. Their advice reminds us that any time we bring a new technology to the classroom, we should recognize its limitations and consider its larger implications.
Some professionals in the field of composition worry that plagiarism detection tools, such as Turnitin.com, may be detrimental to student writing. The most influential professional organization in composition, the Conference on College Communication and Composition (CCCC), suggests that this kind of plagiarism detection program “undermines students’ authority over the uses of their own writing.” In other words, it takes away students’ sense that their writing conveys their own ideas in their own words. When students write with authority, they are not just spitting back “what the teacher wants.”
Why, you might ask, should we care? After all, student writing is just practice writing, isn’t it? It’s not like our writing as academics, which is our bread and butter.
But when we treat student writing as inconsequential, so do students, and the result is the careless productions that we are working to remedy with W courses. Students who do not feel pride of ownership and control over their writing will not give it the time and attention it needs to be excellent.
Composition faculty are also concerned that plagiarism detection programs create an expectation that most students will cheat. Few will do so, although many will document improperly or plagiarize inadvertently. The assumption that students need to be caught undermines trust and makes writing even more distasteful, reinforcing the common belief that it is simply one more hurdle to jump before graduation.
The CCCC also worries that programs like Turnitin.com make faculty complacent by shifting responsibility for detecting plagiarism onto technology. It’s only a matter of time before students learn to beat the system. I have personally tested the service with students, asking them to enter plagiarized writing deliberately for my class; many of their transgressions went undetected. That means students who rely heavily on reports from Turnitin.com or similar services may never discover their errors. More important, they may never learn how to avoid those errors.
Learning citation properly is far more than learning a set of rules; it is learning how a discipline creates and disseminates knowledge. It is subtle, takes time to master, and is the mark of a professional. Still, difficult as it is to teach, we must do so.
As instructors, we cannot let a technology find all the errors, and then, without discussing those errors, expect students to correct them. Turnitin.com cannot teach how to ease a citation into a text without distracting the reader, nor can it teach the difference between direct or indirect quotations, or when or why something might be considered common knowledge. It cannot explain why in some citation styles dates are foregrounded, while in others they are not, nor show why some documents provide internal citations, while others do not.
The key is responsible and ethical use of Turnitin.com. Syllabi should always say if students are expected or required to use it, and they should be informed of the privacy issues raised by ITS. Make sure they know what “identifying information” means. Better yet, do not require the use of Turnitin.com, but make it available to students to use in drafting their writing. Offer help in interpreting results.
Most important, devote class time to discussing the logic of citation and explaining to your students the ways that knowledge is disseminated in your discipline. After all, no technology will ever supplant the need for sound teaching.
