September 2007 — eLearning
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A War of Words
Software programs developed to combat the scourge of student plagiarism have found opposition from the very circle of educators they're meant to help.
THERE WAS SOMETHING DIFFERENT about
the batch of note cards Maribeth Mohan received this past
year from the students in her senior composition class. They
weren't ragged or wrapped in rubber bands, or half-filled with
chicken scratch, lifted word for word from an encyclopedia,
the way they'd been so often in the past. Instead they were
neat and well organized, with the original material presented
alongside the students' own, paraphrased thoughts.
"After 34 years of messing with lost or incomplete note cards, rubber-banded together and very disorganized—and plagiarism issues of all sorts—this was a real breath of fresh air," says Mohan, a teacher at Glenbard High School in Glen Ellyn, IL. The difference between last year's class and ones previous? Last year's group of students used PaperToolsPro, one in a torrent of software programs created over the last 10 years to fight the internet-energized plagiarism epidemic that has infected schools. Mohan says PTP helps her encourage students to use proper research techniques and shows them plainly the difference between plagiarizing and paraphrasing. The software enables students to search for material in an organized fashion and guides them through the process of citing sources, allowing them to assemble their research on note cards that can be sorted various ways and then placed into a word processing document.
Mohan's approach is a proactive measure to ward off student plagiarism, as opposed to the more reactionary applications that have found a number of opponents among the very population they purport to help: educators. One of those unlikely critics is Charlie Lowe, a writing professor at Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, MI, and spokesperson for the 6,000-member Conference on College Composition and Communication, which has published a position paper critical of anti-plagiarism programs. CCCC is among those arguing that the spate of new plagiarism detectors creates the wrong atmosphere for writing, finds a student guilty until proven innocent, and infringes on student rights. The group is especially opposed to products that put student papers in a database to be compared against others, such as iParadigms' popular Turnitin.com, which acquires and inspects student work.
"We have to teach students about plagiarism," Lowe says, "but if all we do is catch them without taking responsibility for the process, how do they learn about the proper use of research material? Technology is no substitute for good teaching."
