McGill student continues fight against anti-plagiarism website

Last Updated Sat, 27 Dec 2003 14:46:28

TORONTO - University students are between semesters right now, enjoying a
bit of a reprieve from the stress of writing essays. But for one student,
there's still a big stress weighing on his mind as he challenges the use of
a counter-plagiarism website. Jesse Rosenfeld of McGill University in
Montreal says he paid a big price for not submitting an essay to a
California-based internet company called Turnitin.com.

The company uses technology to scan papers for evidence of plagiarism. It
compares submitted essays to a data bank of term papers, academic journals,
and other sources. "I got a zero because I refused to submit my paper
to Turnitin.com," says Rosenfeld of the essay he wrote for an economic
development class, a required course for students in McGill's International
Development Studies program.

McGill and 28 other universities and colleges across the country subscribe
to the website for a fee. The Canadian Federation of Students plans to
start a campaign to convince universities to to stop subscribing to the
service. It wants schools to use traditional methods of plagiarizing
protection, such as submitting first drafts of essays and more detailed
bibliographies.

"They treat all students as though they are presumed guilty until
they're proven innocent, and frankly, we have a big problem with
that," said Joel Duff, Ontario chair of the Canadian Federation of
Students.

"We're not out to catch people. We're out to give faculty assistance
in doing their job." said Diane Schulman, the secretary of the
academic council at Ryerson University in Toronto. Ryerson pays about
$5,000 a year for the service and Shulman says it's just one of the tools
the school is using to help prevent plagiarism. "Some of our faculty
were looking for a tool that they could use to help them sort out when
papers were copied from the internet."

Still, not everyone on the faculty is using it. John Cook, the head of
Ryerson's English department, says he doesn't want to introduce an
assignment with such a warning against plagiarism. "I do not want to
begin by talking about the horror that might happen. And it seems to me
that that's what you have to do with a system like Turnitin."

Cook says the move to use systems like Turnitin.com is part of a bigger
problem in Canada's universities. "We've to some extent reached a kind
of impasse in the university in which all that the student does is perform
for evaluation, and the more an essay becomes simply a device for
evaluation, the less significant it is as a device for learning."

Rosenfeld has launched an appeal with McGill, hoping to get his grade
changed. The university's trial use of the web service expired this month
and McGill will have to decide whether not to register for further use.


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