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.

Jesse Rosenfeld

"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.

John Cook

"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.