High-school students fight anti-cheating firm

WASHINGTON — When McLean High School students write this year about Othello or immigration policy, their teachers won't be the only ones examining the papers. So will a California company that specializes in catching cheaters.

The for-profit service, Turnitin, checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world and online sources and electronic archives of journals. Administrators at the Northern Virginia school said the service, which they will start using this week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else's words.

But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend the school's action will tar students at one of Fairfax County's academic powerhouses.

"It irked a lot of people because there's an implication of assumed guilt," said Ben Donovan, 18, a senior who helped collect 1,190 student signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service. "It's like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student."

Questions about the legality and effectiveness of plagiarism-detection services such as Turnitin are being asked beyond McLean High, another sign of the challenge educators face as they navigate benefits and problems the Internet has brought.

School and Turnitin officials said lawyers for the company and various universities have concluded the paper-checking system does not violate student rights. Many educators agree. Turnitin, a leader in the field, lists Georgetown University and the University of Maryland's University College among its clients.

But three professors at Grand Valley State University in Michigan this month posted a letter online arguing that Turnitin "makes questionable use of student intellectual property."

The University of Kansas recently decided to let its contract with Turnitin expire because of cost and intellectual-property concerns. The intellectual-property caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, an organization of 6,000 college-level educators, is debating whether such services "undermine students' authority over the uses of their own writing" and make them feel "guilty until proven innocent," according to a draft position statement.

"There's a lot of debate out there," said Rebecca Ingalls, a University of Tampa English professor who has analyzed Turnitin.

"These students are giving their work to a company that's making money and they are getting no compensation."

Kimberly Carney, an assistant principal at McLean High, said there have been isolated cases of plagiarism at the 1,770-student school. The main reason administrators will use Turnitin is to teach students how to give proper credit to sources, Carney said.

The Fairfax County system began using Turnitin in 2003. More than three-fourths of the county's high schools use the service.

The Center for Academic Integrity, affiliated with Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics, surveyed 18,000 public and private high-school students over four years and found that more than 60 percent admitted to some form of plagiarism, according to a 2005 report.

Turnitin charges about 80 cents a student a year, according to a company official. Fairfax County paid between $24,000 and $30,000 in the last school year for the service, school-system officials said.

Founder John Barrie said Turnitin evolved out of a Web site he created to facilitate peer review when he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. When fellow students complained about cheating classmates, Barrie helped develop a system to catch them. Turnitin's parent company, iParadigms, opened 10 years ago.

The service has grown dramatically, Barrie said, and is used by more than 6,000 academic institutions in 90 countries. He said 60,000 student assignments are added to the database daily. He said no student has ever pursued a legal challenge.

Members of the Committee for Students' Rights want the school to allow students to opt out. They said they can learn about plagiarism directly from teachers and there are other ways to catch cheaters.

They also said fees paid to Turnitin would be better spent on other educational matters.