Thankfully, not all schools:
Some educators have rejected [Turnitin] and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
Trip Gabriel, “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery, July 5, 2010″
I’ve always thought that if I were a teacher, I’d punish the lazy cheaters, but give a wrist slap to the clever ones. Just because if you’re working that hard to cheat, you’re learning something (even if it’s not what is in the syllabus) — you might end up running security for banks or something.
Probably best that I’m not a teacher.
haha, yeah, good thing, you’re not a teacher. You would really shake things up.
Having been a TA and having caught people cheating, the professors didn’t really want to get involved, which I can understand.
There is something to “you’re
onlycheating yourself” — just found Pamela J. S. Wilson’s thoughts on this which is a solid counter.The whole evaluation thing was very piecemeal and overall poor back when I was in university. Stories like “In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That” upset me, and suggest the state is no better today.
I remember reading this article and thinking that the extremes these people are going to really miss the point of learning. After all, the goal is to some way to measure that students have grasped the material, not to catch them cheating.
Good points all around. I feel like it’s hard to pinpoint the root cause or combination that would begin accounting for that general mistrust in students, however it’s all pretty sad considering the large bureaucracies of the public school systems seems to have no accountability for much of anything in the first place (including test scores). I wonder if the general lack of control would reject those measures well-knowing it may further make American schools look bad?
My school once had an experiment. For the end of term exam, everyone was allowed to take any books, tables, calculaters – in fact any ‘cheating’ aids into the exams with them. The result was that nothing changed. The class positions remained the same and the overall percentage marks didn’t vary by more than 5%.
I stumbled upon your website by typing in “Is turnitin big brother” into the Google search box. In a world of noise I found Lloyd’s comments (along with the comments of the others on this blog subject) to be refreshing. . . .nobody calling others swear words. . .just honesty and insight. My 13-year-old daughter just turned in her first paper into turnitin today!. . . .and I am totally bugged about it. I am an unpublished writer (hack, at least I want to be this) and I found so many problems with this turnitin “service” that I won’t bore you here. . . . I’ve very gently broached this subject with some educators, and the responses that I get are somewhere between “I have issues that I need to work out”. . . .to “I need to understand how much easier this makes teaching”. . . . It’s just nice not to be alone. . . thanks.