Anti-cheating database banned at N.S. university
Last Updated: Wednesday, March 8, 2006 | 11:36 AM ET
CBC News
Student leaders at Mount Saint Vincent University in Bedford, N.S., have been lobbying to stop professors from using the online database turnitin.com, and the university's senate agreed in a vote on Monday.
The university is banning all plagiarism detection software as of May, when the summer session begins.
"Students go to university for a higher education. They don't go to be involved in a culture of mistrust, a culture of guilt," said Chantal Brushett, president of the students union.
- FROM NOV. 9, 2005: N.S. students lobby against cheat-and-tell site
About 4,000 schools worldwide use the California-based subscription site to check whether a student's work is really someone else's.
Assignments submitted to professors are uploaded to turnitin.com. The program then checks each student's paper against a database of more than 4.5 billion pages of newspapers, academic journals, books and other students' reports.
If a student's paper has more than eight consecutive words in common with another source, the words are highlighted, alerting the instructor to possible plagiarism.
Students at several Canadian universities that use the service have objected to the practice, saying an American company is profiting by fostering an atmosphere of distrust at Canadian campuses.
They also don't like the fact that their own work becomes part of the database when it is submitted.
- FROM DEC. 27, 2003: McGill student continues fight against anti-plagiarism website
Brushett acknowledges that some students do cheat, but she fears someone could be accused of plagiarism before the professor even reads that person's paper.
"It's the feeling of guilt when you go in a classroom, the fact that your intellectual property is not being valued the way it should," she said.
Despite Mount Saint Vincent University's action this week, Dalhousie University in nearby Halifax still supports turnitin.com.
"Universities are having to deal with an increased use of plagiarized material [and] a softer sense among some of our student population about what honesty entails," said Sam Scully, vice-president academic at Dalhousie.
