Well if we leave the ethical questions aside (which is a hard thing to do!) the legal advice given by the university lawyer and my institution (in Australia) was that we should change the faculty regulations so that submission via Turnitin was a course requirement and thus consent is given to use Turnitin at the moment of enrolement. That said, the legal issues that may arise (but haven't yet in Australia) have stopped the majority of faculties here using Turnitin. -- Dr Tama Leaver Associate Lecturer (Higher Education Development) Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (M400) University of Western Australia 35 Stirling Highway Crawley WA 6009 Australia Ph: (+61 8) 6488 1502 Fax: (+61 8) 6488 1156 www: http://www.catl.uwa.edu.au www: http://www.tamaleaver.net blog: http://ponderance.blogspot.com edublog: http://tama.edublogs.org On 3/9/07, Mark Warschauer <markw@uci.edu> wrote:

I know of no precedent or case law, but this is an issue that is taken seriously here at UC Irvine. Students are usually given the permission to opt out of submitting their papers through Turnitin.com, but professors then require any students who opt out to complete one or more alternate assignments to demonstrate their papers were not plagiarized (and those alternatives can be quite onerous). See examples at http://eee.uci.edu/faculty/ccopenha/39b-student/turnitin.students.htm

Mark Warschauer

...

Dear AOIRers,

A colleague teaching another course has come across an issue with an undergrad who refuses to hand in her term paper because the faculty member's course requires that all papers also be submitted to Turnitin.com.

The student claims that this violates her own intellectual property because Turnitin reportedly keeps copies for future plagiarism searches.

As a supposed ICT & society "expert," my colleague came to me for advice. My first thought was horsefeathers.

However, I am wondering if there is any precedent or case law on this in Canada or the US. (EU would be too different, I think.)

I am not interested in the ethics or the morality of Turnitin, but in how other situations have been resolved.

Thanks, Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________

Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________

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