Electronic Plagiarism Checkers: Barriers to Developing an Academic Voice (original) (raw)

kathleen gillis, susan lang, monica norris, and laura palmer texas tech university recently, we embarked upon a large scale examination of two popular electronic plagiarism checkers-Turnitin.com (Tii) and SafeAssignment (SA). Two specific events encouraged this effort. The first was an invitation from our assistant vice provost to participate in an upcoming university roundtable discussion that sought to answer the question "Should our campus purchase a site license for plagiarism detection service and, if so, which product would best meet our needs?" Second, our university was revising its writing intensive criteria, and faculty who taught these courses were interested in finding ways to enhance students' use of writing as a tool for learning while not increasing the amount of time they had to spend assessing that writing. Admittedly, none of us were fans of plagiarism detection applications; as is the case with many faculty members, our attitudes toward these applications had been formed after only limited contact with them. To combat this bias, we chose to examine the reports generated by each application after submitting a total of 400 freshmen essays to the two applications under consideration. Why freshmen essays? First, decisions about writing programs, whether they be first-year or full WAC/WID programs, must reflect local conditions. In this case, the First-Year Writing Program at Texas Tech University was in the process of moving toward a WAC/WID emphasis with hopes that this would constitute the first step of instituting a four-year writing program in the College of Arts and Sciences. It was important to learn how each of these plagiarism-detection systems interprets writing from students who are currently engaged in a WAC/WID-like First-Year Writing Program. Second, we felt we had to move beyond anecdotes and conduct a more robust study, one that actually involved the submission of a large number of documents. While many studies have tested the accuracy of the programs and their ability to deter or prevent plagiarism, the samples were small in number, ranging anywhere from two to 150 drafts