dimanche 8 février 2015

Potential issues with uploading copyrighted material to TurnItIn?


My university uses TurnItIn to check student's work for plagiarism and collusion. I think the underlying TurnItIn database includes both submitted work and material it has found by crawling the web, but not material behind pay walls. One major issue with TurnItIn, and presumably all plagiarism detection software, is that it can only compare submitted work to material which is in the database. This means that TurnItIn either misses when students copy from textbooks which are behind a pay wall or matches other sources which have plagiarised the textbook.


My department's academic misconduct committee is thinking about seeding the TurnItIn database with the textbook chapters that are most often used by the students by submitting a number of "assignments" that are copies of the textbook chapters. This would require an individual member(s) of staff to submit assignments that contained copied copyright material. Is it possible that this could get the staff member in trouble in the future? We were thinking about adding something like:



The following submission is intended to seed the TurnItIn database and is an exact copy of FULL REFERENCE.



Would this work, or would TurnItIn realize that it is being given copyrighted material and purge it from its database?





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