Opposition to trapper software

Trappers (like “TurnItIn”) are ineffective against the deliberate and determined plagiarist.

Trappers can only recognize superficial plagiarism when they find a duplication of the language in its database.

This doesn’t touch the student who pays someone to write her/her paper or the student who has figured out how to game the system.

It also teaches the student an inaccurate understanding of what plagiarism is – namely if one paraphrases / sufficiently disguises the language then it is “not plagiarism.”

Moreover, trapper software may teach students to take recognizable / verbatim language and tinker with it enough to disguise another’s work as one’s own. Trapper software may enable plagiarism.

Some Faculty have students keep running a paper through one of these programs until it comes back “clean.”

Kathy Hassall said this is not the approach she prefers to take towards plagiarism and does not want us to put any money towards this approach.

Furthermore, this approach has underlying assumptions: that students will plagiarize and that faculty role is to expose and punish them.

The most profound kind of plagiarism is when someone’s argument or idea is reworked in new language as one’s own. This would not be picked up by software.

Students can’t learn academic integrity if we don’t give them an opportunity to learn and practice it. Ideally, our students should understand what is at stake and be committed to responsible scholarship, believe in and understand the idea of academic integrity because we expect that of them (and they live up to that) and not because we teach them to fear being caught.

Evidence in learning theory that high expectations that are clear and perceived as reasonable and are fairly administered are a powerful motivator of behavior. We will reap what we expect (plagiarism, or academic integrity).

Finally, my sixth reason is that I don’t think we can teach civil discourse. I think a commitment to civil discourse and responsible scholarship is the highest value of the academy. I don’t think that we can teach it, if we don’t model it. And I think if we approach our students as either incompetents or criminals, if we approach them in an insulting way, we are not ourselves modeling civil discourse.

I’m interested in programs that will help the students as they go to avoid making mistakes, to understand what is responsible ways, fair use, what is fair documentation, what is fair representation, what is fair citation. Where we’ve caught plagiarist in writing programs, we have worked very hard to make that a teaching and learning opportunity, and leave the student stronger afterwards and not weaker and determined never to do it again. I believe we can teach from that, but I don’t believe that’s ever the most desirable way to start; with the student embarrassed having done something wrong, having been caught in a public way.

PowerResearcher is a program where the student creates a record every place he’s been and it’s an undeletable record. So it still has a passive policing effect via technology.

All of the UNF academic integrity policies speak to consequences of not following the “rules” but do not provide students an opportunity to learn the “rules.” Namely, it is a punitive policy and not an empowering one.