Say It Again Sam

Here in Northern Virginia, students at McLean High School are complaining about the fact that their school is using the services of Turnitin.com. This site is a site which contains literally thousands of documents and essays and reports which are used to create a database against which student papers are compared. The purpose of this is to ensure that the work done by the students is original and has not been copied or plagiarised from another source. Plagiarism has become quite a problem of late and with the proliferation of services and reports on the internet, it's not difficult to imagine how this could happen. Take for example the incidents earlier this year in which reputed authors were accused of plagiarising passages and text from other books. If authors are getting into hot water about it, what about students?

The students argue that their work is being taken and used in the databases of Turnitin.com without their permission or their being compensated. Once an essay is reviewed by the site, it is added to the database so that the database will have the most up to date copies of papers and will remain current. I can see the point that the students are attempting to make. Their work is being added to the database at the site; the site is a pay site that the school or county must pay for, so by taking the student papers, they are making the site that much more marketable. One could argue that there's no way for the site to remain profitable if they begin to compensate every student for their submission. In fact, how are you to set a standard for compensation in the first place? Is a two page paper worth as much as a ten page paper? Is a high school research project more valuable than a master's thesis project?

The students further contend that the use of the site and the fact that their papers are being submitted there is like saying that the students are guilty of plagiarism. I have had experiences with the site during my masters program. In one of my previous classes, the professor had told us that he would be submitting our papers to the site to check for plagiarism. Not because he thought we were all lifting articles, but more to determine if we were citing articles correctly. Whenever we write a research paper, some of the thoughts we are relating are not our own. As such, we cannot help but either quote or paraphrase what is being said. In either case, it is our responsibility to indicate where the thought came from. Especially if the thought is not our own or our original one.

The fact that the students feel wronged in that they aren't being compensated for their works is a valid one. The site boasts that it checks papers against 22 million articles in their database; I'm sure I have several submissions on their floating around. If so, I take some measure of comfort in the fact that no one will be stealing my thoughts without being called on it. And compensation? Well, the fact that my paper has been graded, and that the thoughts in the paper have proven to be my own indicate that if my logic is sound, that should be good compensation as it is. Back in May there was a big stink over Kaavya Viswanathan having plagiarised sections of her book. This threw egg on lots of faces. Firstly, Ms. Viswanathan, intentionally or unintentionally, quoted sections from the book which should have raised flags someplace. If the editors or publishers had used a service like Turnitin.com then they could have stopped things prior to the book even being published.

The students may feel that they are being cheated out of income; but to me, the greater return on their allowing their papers to be used in this way is that they will become better writers and better thinkers. Why use someone else's thoughts when yours are just as important? If you agree with someone's viewpoint then explain why you do rather than quoting it word for word. People have told me that it's easier for me to write than it is for others. That may be true but I always believed that we have to power to express ourselves. Some people write books, others just write papers, and still others can say it in a paragraph. But whatever you choose to use to spread your word, say it the way you would and not the way others have.