McLean High School eases mandate that students submit essays to anti-plagiarism service
McLean High School (MHS) in Fairfax County, Virginia has eased a mandate that students submit essays and other writing assignments to a for-profit anti-plagiarism service known as Turnitin. The new policy would have required students in all grades to submit essays and other assignments to Turnitin, which polices papers for plagiarism. However, when a group of seniors circulated a petition against the initiative, school administrators decided to implement the policy incrementally. Only ninth and tenth grade English and social studies classes will use Turnitin, and the requirement will be phased in. Turnitin has a massive database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. Over 6,000 academic institutions in 90 countries use the service. Some MHS students objected to their essays being added to the database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. While acknowledging that the protests caused them to slow the process, Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) officials insist Turnitin does not violate students’ rights. "We're not saying we're not going to do this at McLean," says FCPS spokesman Paul Regnier. "We believe our legal status is adequate, and we expect that it's going to be used." However, the Committee for Students' Rights (CSR), which spearheaded the protests, is not satisfied with the compromise. CSR plans to hand out fliers at an upcoming Parent Teacher Student Association meeting outlining their position. They have collected about 1,200 signatures on a petition against mandatory use of the service.
Although educators agree that plagiarism is a growing problem because students can cut and paste material from a plethora of online sources, the legality and effectiveness of plagiarism detection services are being debated on some college campuses. The intellectual property caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, an organization of 6,000 college-level educators, is considering a draft position statement that questions whether such services "undermine students' authority over the uses of their own writing." MHS Principal Paul Wardinski says Turnitin will be used as a teaching tool, not a "gotcha." Students will submit drafts to the service and will be able to make changes before turning in their work for a grade. However, freshmen and sophomores who refuse to use the service will receive a zero. Mr. Wardinski believes plagiarism is rare at MHS and that the value of Turnitin is that it helps students identify unintentional copying and teaches them to write proper citations and footnotes. "I tell people, I never thought about blowing up a plane or hijacking a plane, but I go through the same security line as everyone else," he says. "If we wanted to catch kids because we thought they were cheating, we wouldn't use this approach. This is to help kids become better writers."
Washington Post
By Maria Glod
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[Editor’s Note: For more coverage, see the article below from the online version of the student newspaper of Montgomery County Public Schools’ Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.]
Black & White
By Alex Sopko
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