Anxiety and the Archive: Understanding Plagiarism Detection Services as Digital Archives

The ethics and politics of policing plagiarism: a qualitative study of faculty views on student plagiarism and Turnitin®

“…Some have argued that, in using Turnitin ® , instructors unfairly presume students are guilty until the software proves them innocent (Holi Ali 2013;Zwagerman 2008) or that the software's use damages the relation of trust that should exist between teacher and student (McKeever 2006;Williams 2007). Others have blamed teachers for facilitating Turnitin ® 's exploitation of students, since students who want credit for assignments may have no meaningful choice in the matter (Purdy 2009;Townley and Parsell 2004).…”

Challenging the profiles of a plagiarist: a study of abstracts submitted to an international interdisciplinary conference

“…Some see these shortcomings of Turnitin and similar tools as significant given the cost of subscribing to the service and the disproportionate impact on writers with fewer material resources, who would not be able to afford hiring others to "game" the service. 3 We mention these criticisms because Turnitin is not a neutral tool for analysis and is not simply a digital archive of texts (Purdy, 2009). 4 Our study used this common method for detecting matched text in a corpus of texts, but we wanted to look more carefully at the behaviors of faculty writers.…”

Technology as a Double-Edged Sword: A Promise Yet to Be Fulfilled or a Vehicle for Cheating?

“…Students will challenge and sometimes deliberately break the rules, they will be guided by grade point average perspectives (Becker, Geer, & Hughes, 1968), they will be cue seeking (Miller & Parlett, 1974), and sometimes they will even cheat. Technologies to prevent, detect, and deter deception have also been commonplace, from the cells in Chinese literary examinations (Elman, 2000), the proctored tests in England (Hilton, 1904), the seating arrangements (Houston, 1986) to the current use of biometrical authentication (Rose, 2011), and plagiarism detection systems (Nilsson, 2013;Purdy, 2009, Weber-Wolff, 2012. Dows (2005) writes about the efforts to control the pre-examination, examination, and post-examination phases and invites academics to think about technology as a means of taking control of a chain of action that starts with test design and ends with the protection of material during grading and redistribution.…”