Abstract
Plagiarism detection services are a powerful tool to help encourage academic integrity. Adoption of these services has proven to be controversial due to ethical concerns about students’ rights. Central to these concerns is the fact that most such systems make permanent archives of student work to be re-used in plagiarism detection. This computerization and automation of plagiarism detection is changing the relationships of trust and responsibility between students, educators, educational institutions, and private corporations. Educators must respect student privacy rights when implementing such systems. Student work is personal information, not the property of the educator or institution. The student has the right to be fully informed about how plagiarism detection works, and the fact that their work will be permanently archived as a result. Furthermore, plagiarism detection should not be used if the permanent archiving of a student’s work may expose him or her to future harm.
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Notes
Andrea Foster presents a broad overview of the controversies surrounding student rights. Cynthia Townley and Mitch Parsell comment on privacy only in passing, as one motivation for their proposed remedies for student plagiarism.
I use “archive” to mean a collection of documents that is systematic, centrally administered, and permanent. The copies of student work that might be inadvertently left behind on lab computers are not “archives,” but the electronic submission features of courseware sites (like BlackBoard) are.
Claim rights are those rights that require someone else to act on our behalf. For example, one cannot exercise the right to a free primary education on one’s own. Everyone else in society has to contribute some money in order for this to happen. This is contrasted with liberties, which are rights that one has as long as others do not interfere. Religious freedom is one example of a liberty.
Neither the authorship nor the date of this document are clear. Because it was posted on TurnItIn.com in 2008, authorship is attributed here to iParadigms LLC, the parent company of TurnItIn.com. The most likely date for the document is probably 2002 or 2003, since it talks about the Owasso decision as being “recent.”
This document is no longer available from TurnItIn.com. Because the field of plagiarism deterrence is changing rapidly, many of the documents cited as evidence in this article have evolved over time. I use “as accessed on” in the bibliography entry to note the cases where I am referring to an older version of the document.
The reader should understand that the issue is intentionally simplified here. A detailed legal understanding of the principles involved is not necessary for this discussion, as long as the reader is aware that “personal” information receives special privacy protections under US law.
For example, Foster (2002) reports that UC San Diego required professors to inform students, though they did not have a uniform policy for what to do if students refused to comply. Townley and Parsell (2004) feel that it is not possible to get informed consent in this situation because of the unequal power structure in the student–teacher relationship. The Library at UMass Amherst recommends informing students through the syllabus, and provides standardized language for this purpose.
Readers familiar with US contract law may feel that “detrimental reliance” is out of place here. The term is adopted from Richard Posner’s book (2007). I believe that he intentionally used this term to suggest that there is an implied contract between author and reader.
Encyclopedia Britannica (2012) defines "duality" as the “principle whereby one true statement can be obtained from another by merely interchanging two words”. The definition has been reworded to emphasize the fact that the dual of a true statement might be false, and vice versa. Duality is most interesting, however, when both the statement and its dual are true.
Posner argues that originality is most likely a bad thing in textbooks, course materials, and lecture slides, unless the professor happens to be the world’s foremost expert in the topic at hand (Posner 2007).
These web sites have evolved over time. Here I am citing material that was available on the “as accessed on” date listed in the references.
TurnItIn.com, in particular, makes a digital “fingerprint” of each document in its database, and uses these fingerprints to detect plagiarism. The idea is that the fingerprint is not enough, by itself, to reconstruct the original document. Document fingerprinting is a widely studied problem in document management. Many different techniques have been proposed for solving the problem. Schleimer et al. (2003), for example, propose storing patterns of letters that occur next to each other in the document, but which seldom appear together in everyday written English.
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Brinkman, B. An Analysis of Student Privacy Rights in the Use of Plagiarism Detection Systems. Sci Eng Ethics 19, 1255–1266 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9370-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9370-y