Returning students’ right to access, choice and notice: a proposed code of ethics for instructors using Turnitin

In their 2010 study, these authors submitted 24 papers from a variety of Education publications in their entirety to Turnitin (and one other PDS) and found that none of them were identified as 100% plagiarized. Unfortunately, the authors do not indicate whether or not the papers that came down with lower matches still contained enough information to lead the instructor to the original source. Regardless, these findings indicate that the databases against which Turnitin checks its material may contain significant gaps. The author of this article did a similar non-scientific test in which he uploaded six articles from six different disciplines and databases to Turnitin with significantly better results. Turnitin correctly labeled three of the six papers as 100% plagiarized.

In order for an outside party to qualify as a school official, three conditions have to be met:

According to Turnitin, it meets all three conditions. While this may very well be the case, there are some reasons to doubt this. It is far from certain that Turnitin is under the “direct control” of the schools with which it has licensing agreements (criterion three). It is also unclear that if not for Turnitin, institutions would otherwise provide the service themselves. It seems unlikely that institutions would collect papers from students at different schools to compare their students’ papers against. Turnitin reads this requirement as meaning that given “an inordinate amount of resources” it would be conceivable that a school would perform this service itself, but the Department of Education seems to require likelihood, not logical possibility, for this criterion to be met. Moreover, section 99.33 (a) (2) of FERPA states that “officers, employees, and agents of a party that receives information under paragraph (a)(1) of this section [the “school official” exemption] may use the information, but only for the purposes for which the disclosure was made.” The educational purpose of the disclosure is to conduct an originality analysis of the paper submitted to Turnitin, and one could argue that to have the paper become part of a database falls outside the purpose of disclosure.