For years, Tufts' policy on plagiarism has consisted of little more than "eyes on your own paper" and "cite references properly."
The administration has always maintained that Tufts does not look lightly upon academic dishonesty, and has tried to ensure a tough stance. But despite its efforts, cheating is still a relatively large problem.
A 21st century solution hopes to change all that. Starting in fall of 2006, an Internet database program called TurnItIn.com will become available to all faculty members at Tufts.
Professors who wish to use the system will have students sign on to the site and submit their work, at which point it will be compared against a massive database of student works from other academic institutions as well as nearly 4.5 billion pages of internet content and scholarly journals.
The service, which will cost approximately $5,000 to implement fully, has already been in use since January 2005 by the Biology department and the Dean of Students' office. Technical concerns aside, both parties have reported great success with the technology and are excited about others following suit.
While the Web site is the most comprehensive service around, students can still find ways to plagiarize, as not all universities use the site.
Turnitin.com claims that thousands of academic institutions from around the world use the service, but obviously students could still get material from those which do not.
The service also suffers from the fault of any technology in that is susceptible to error. There could potentially be logical flaws in the code it employs, which could result in either falsely positive or falsely negative cases of plagiarism. Furthermore, there is always the risk posed by malicious hackers.
Despite these flaws, the addition of TurnItIn.com to the tool boxes of professors will go a long way in combating plagiarism.
The increased threat of being caught will serve as a deterrent to many plagiarizers. It also allows for a more comprehensive search, far more quickly.
Professors are clearly capable of identifying a significant percentage of plagiarism cases on their own, and with the aid of a comparison tool, can spot the vast majority.
But with the ability to detect plagiarism at the click of a button, professors risk becoming more reliant on the program and less so on their professional intuitions.
But professors should still use a great deal of discretion. As part of the schoolwide launch of TurnItIn.com, however, the Dean of Students office has taken away professors' discretion by requiring them to report any case of academic dishonesty.
At an Apr. 19 faculty meeting, Dean of Students Bruce Reitman announced that faculty will be required to report all such incidents.
While this solution may help to level the bar across departments where students have previously received varying degrees of treatment, it also brings a problem: bureaucratization.
There is a need for a school-wide standard of academic integrity, but centralizing and channeling every instance of plagiarism through one center is impractical.
Nonetheless, these steps reflect a willingness on the administration's part to recognize a problem that, if left unaddressed, could come to compromise the reputation of our institution as well as our students. (Harvard's Kaavya Viswanathan, anyone?)
That the administration is taking action to support its claims of being tough on plagiarism is a step in the right direction. Let's hope that step pans out, rather than getting wrapped up in red tape.
