Students get anti-plagerism software banned
Congratulations to the Students at Mount Saint Vincent University, who have got software by Turnitin banned because it allegedly brought about punishment which was too severe, automatically presumed guilt and created a climate of fear.
They also aired fears that the PATRIOT act provisions would cause the papers to be subject to searches under the Patriot Act and students were worried about intellectual property right issues.
As a fan of re-use and collaboration and thereby libraries and open source software, I think it’s easy for professors and administrators to put too much faith in computerized cheating detection. Determining when someone’s use of other material is inappropriate or against the rules is very difficult and should be left to humans with reasoning skills.
While I was a student at UF, the professors in the CISE department would say they ran all of our programs through MOSS and they regularly caught people cheating. Perhaps this type of thing will spread.