New School Politics

If you're a first time visitor, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, which will keep you up to date with all the latest New School Politics posts. Thanks for visiting!

In today’s fast paced world, students are compelled to do whatever they can to get ahead. Stiff competition from quickly expanding third-world countries like India and China has motivated the US government to start new initiatives seeking to bring education to the forefront. In the process, thousands of students across the country are caught up; desperately trying to find their way in an increasingly difficult to navigate system. College admissions are on the rise, as evidenced by a recent New York Times article. The article mentions the fact that oftentimes even the most qualified students [those with either a 4.0 Grade Point Average or perfect 2400 SAT scores] are rejected from America’s top universities.

The increasing level of competition often drives students to participate in rather unsavory activities. Plagiarism, cheating, and other dishonest academic behaviors run rampant through the halls of America’s educational institutions. The new wave of perfidy has given way to a rise in organizations that combat academic deception. iParadigms, LLC, was one of the first companies to fight plagiarism. Their turnitin.com service, which originally began as plagiarism.org, has become the de facto leader in a rapidly proliferating field.

They face challenges from the law, however. Four students from across the country are suing iParadigms for copyright infringement of their intellectual property. The Washington Post broke the story first, noting that while the service is valuable to dozens of academic institutions, it may violate several US laws. The service, utilized by dozens of colleges [including Harvard and Georgetown Universities] and high schools [including the one the founders of New School Politics attend], purports to catch plagiarism. My experience with the service proves its thoroughness. Whenever I cite from an online source, Turnitin always knows where I’ve cited from. Even snippets from essays like “Bill of Rights” are highlighted because they are often used by the authors of other papers. The question is, however: does Turnitin violate the rights of students? The four students that are bringing the lawsuit against iParadigms allege that they copyrighted their papers before submitting them and explicitly acknowledged that they’d like them not to remain on Turnitin’s servers. As the service is automated, it was unable to respond to that request and archived their papers anyway. The WP cites Andrew Beckerman-Rodau of Suffolk University Law School, who notes that “it seems like Turnitin is a commercial use. They turn around and sell this service, and it’s expensive. And the service only works because they get these papers.”

I’m not an expert, but I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the case because I have some [albeit limited] knowledge of intellectual property law and experience with Turnitin’s service. There are no objections to the fact that Turnitin does archive student papers. Unfortunately for iParadigms, in this case, the papers they archived were copyrighted. Turnitin, however, seems to have their bases covered. In an online intellectual property Q&A [caution: the file is a PDF], they assert that the “legality of the services has been confirmed by our nationally recognized law firm, Foley & Lardner, and law firms throughout the world.” The upcoming trial will test their claim.

The bigger question is: should such services even be necessary? In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, an article entitled “The Admissions Police“, runs down a list of reasons for admissions counselors at America’s top universities to be vigilant. They provide several examples of students falsifying information on applications. Has the world pressured students so much that they now must lie to get ahead in life? Several of the colleges mentioned in the article are even hiring professional private investigators to do background checks on prospective students. Whose fault is this? Has society pressured students into lying…is this somehow the fault of government? The disconcerting news of dishonesty in academia should serve as a warning-bell of a nascent trend. If this tradition is to continue without structure, could academia only become an area where students learn vile habits for later life? Several have argued that, instead of vetting papers through services like Turnitin, students should have morality lessons in school. The case with Turnitin is cause for distress. Is society forcing students to distort themselves into something they’re not? As one-time students progress into the work world, their habits may travel with them, bringing a new era of dishonest and a lack of accountability in the future. Conservatives are constantly concerned with family values but few have approached the area of education [besides arguing for Creationism to be taught in schools]. Morality may start at home, but school’s an important place as well. As America’s educational system groans under the further weight of deceit and deception, it’s important to ensure that accountability in education is preserved.

Last 5 posts by Zach

• Vote! - November 4th, 2008
• At Least She's Not a Quitter - June 5th, 2008
• Fidel Castro Steps Down - February 19th, 2008
• The New School Goes Road Trippin' - February 13th, 2008
• Obama Outlines Economic Plan in New Speech - February 13th, 2008

Popularity: 43% [?]

The Accountability in Education: A Vanishing Tradition? by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.