As Jumbos work feverishly to finish those long, tedious midterm papers this week, they may find they have something new to stress about. With more and more professors using Turnitin.com to detect plagiarism, those tiny letters in the footnote section of the paper could lead to a big, fat letter 'F' on a student's transcript - or worse.
According to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman, the number of faculty members using Tufts' university-wide subscription to Turnitin.com has grown from roughly 70 last semester to nearly 100 this spring. The service allows professors to submit students' work and have it checked against "billions of pages" of published works, previously-submitted papers and Internet sources, according to the site.
The increase comes on the heels of a resolution passed by Tufts faculty last April, which standardized the university's responses to academic dishonesty and required that all cases be brought to the Dean of Student Affairs Office. According to Reitman, the number of reported cases has nearly doubled in the past year as more professors have started using the site.
"[Turnitin.com] is a very useful resource because sometimes we have reason to think the work is not a student's own, but it's hard to track down the sources that it came from," said Associate Professor of Philosophy Erin Kelly, who has used Turnitin.com to check papers that she suspected might have been plagiarized or incorrectly footnoted.
"It makes it easier to confront students about academic dishonesty than when you just have a vague theory that the person isn't properly footnoting their sources," she added.
But with the increased convenience in preventing plagiarism, some students and professors say the site has brought concerns as well.
"There's some both students and faculty that said, 'Is this, the adoption of using Turnitin, a statement that we don't trust students?'" Reitman said. "The answer to that, I think, is to some extent yes."
Reitman said academic honor codes, which some universities prefer to services like Turnitin.com, show similar distrust by asking students to sign written oaths pledging academic honesty, and promising to turn in their friends if they see them cheating or plagiarizing.
He also cited research done through the Rutgers School of Management which reported that one in two Tufts students "had either themselves cheated or knew someone who had cheated in their time at Tufts," he said.
"That's a somewhat alarming rate," Reitman said. "I think there's an awareness that cheating on college campuses in America is higher than we'd like to think."
A graph on Turnitin.com called "How Students Plagiarize" reflected similar results, reporting that 29 percent of student papers include significant plagiarism, 1 percent are completely plagiarized, and 70 percent have no plagiarism at all.
According to Political Science Professor Kerry Chase, however, Turnitin.com's assessments of papers should be taken with a grain of salt.
"I was very intrigued when I heard about the service, so I submitted two of my own articles to the site," he said. "I found that, when you submit something to the site, it gives you an originality number for your submission, and that number is essentially meaningless."
Chase explained that, while the site was valuable for finding sections of a paper that may be plagiarized, and often provides links to the alleged sources of the plagiarism, it also can highlight sections that are correctly credited.
"If you actually want to assess a paper's originality, you have to do a lot of work," he said. According to Chase, evaluating a paper in that way requires going through each section highlighted by the Turnitin.com service and comparing them with the actual source.
"The service could potentially be misleading if insufficient attention and thought are put into assessing the results," he said.
Kelly felt similarly.
"I think it's sometimes hard to judge how intentional [plagiarism picked up by the site] is," she said. According to Kelly, the site only picked up mild problems in students papers rather than outright plagiarism.
"I used them as opportunities to educate the students in question about properly footnoting sources," she said.
But according to the academic integrity guidelines outlined by last April's faculty resolution, even small instances of dishonesty picked up by the site could - and in most cases should - be reported to the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs.
The resolution said that "Faculty members who encounter an instance where substantial evidence of academic dishonesty exists must report the situation to the Dean of Student Affairs office," rather than handling consequences on an individual basis, as has been done in the past.
Once a problem is reported, students could be put on Probation I, even for plagiarism with "no intent to deceive the instructor," or "improper citing of source work," according to the Academic Integrity Booklet. For harsher offenses, students can be put on Probation II or face suspension or expulsion.
According to Reitman, though, many students are pleased that teachers are using the service.
"Students have actually expressed that they're glad that the program is here because they were feeling that there was a prevalence of dishonesty - or cheating - that was a source of unhappiness for them," he said. "They didn't want to turn others in, but others were getting better grades and not doing their own work."
In addition to occasionally detecting plagiarism where it does not exist, both Chase and Kelly said Turnitin.com may miss instances of plagiarism that come from certain sources.
"It doesn't seem to be 100 percent thorough," Kelly said, recounting how she found one incorrectly cited passage on Google.com that had not been picked up by Turnitin.com.
Kelly called Turnitin.com a "time-saver," and said she would only use it when she already suspects plagiarism in a student's paper, rather than requiring all students to submit their papers through the site.
"I think [requiring students to use the site] puts people on edge and creates an atmosphere of suspicion," she said. "I don't want people to feel they're being scrutinized in that way unless we feel there's some kind of red flag in their work."
But according to Associate Professor of English Linda Bamber, the director of Tufts first-year writing program, Turnitin.com is only necessary in large lecture classes, where there is minimal contact between students and the professor. In most classes, she said, plagiarism is easily detectable.
"Plagiarism is rarely a problem in first-year writing because the teachers know the students very well, and they know each student's style. The teacher knows what your voice is like, and you can't come in with someone else's voice.
"It's like wearing a mask to class," she added. "The professor will notice."
