Students at McLean High School, in Virginia, have already expressed their displeasure with Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection service used by thousands of schools and colleges (The Chronicle, September 22, 2006). Now they're taking their complaints to court, as The Washington Post reports.
Two unnamed students from the school filed suit this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., citing copyright law and seeking $900,000 in damages from iParadigms LLC, Turnitin's parent company. (A pair of Arizona students, also unnamed, are co-plaintiffs. All of the students are minors.)
Does the lawsuit have legs? Some intellectual-property experts think so. When teachers or professors submit students' essays to Turnitin, the company adds those papers to a massive database against which subsequent submissions are checked. It does so without reimbursing the students, and that's where the lawsuit comes in. The McLean students submitted copyrighted papers to Turnitin with instructions that they not be stored in the company's archive. The students say Turnitin went ahead and did so anyway. –Brock Read
3 Responses to High-School Students Take On Turnitin
tcicollegeof - March 20, 2012 at 11:49 am
“… private-sector institutions cannot change their essential nature as career training in the best instances and scams in the worst…. Confusion may be the name of the game at the for-profit colleges, but the rest of us…. Do the newly dubbed “professors” at a for-profit institution find their calling, like the Cowardly Lion,…?”
Exactly how are non-profits, those great superior bastions of wisdom, raising the moral and cultural tenor of society, vis-a-vis for-profits, those currently convenient scapegoats and distractors from society’s problems?
Are non-profits superior in that they produce: Degrees marketed as job tickets and initiations into old-boys’ networks. Graduates without jobs and with lifetimes of immense debt. Life-threatening competition, and beer and athletic industries that elicit alumni/-ae funding. Government and corporation grants to support researchers who can’t teach and are not interested in teaching. Astronomical salaries and benefits for institution presidents, and trustees with vested interests and agendas.
My experience of both a for-profit and a couple of non-profits is that students at the for-profit have greater seriousness of purpose, despite or because of huge social struggles, and that they craft many moving success stories; that even those who are unable to complete take something away that contributes to the community, and that the level of teaching in the face of the most difficult odds is exemplary.
And what’s wrong with college for those who learn better when their hands and bodies are involved in learning as well as their minds? I recommend that anyone who thinks that for-profits are pushovers take an HVAC course.
For-Profit U - March 21, 2012 at 9:16 am
No one is saying that students at for-profit colleges are less serious, less intelligent or any different than students at non-profits. The problem is how a for-profit college markets itself to prospective students, makes promises they cannot keep or never had an intention of keeping, encourage if not force prospective students into enrolling even after they say they cannot, and outright lie to their students.
Non-profit schools do many of the marketing tactics listed in the article above. The problem is that for-profit colleges are based on a Wall Street business model, and at the end of the day their goal is not to serve the student, it’s to serve the CEOs and shareholders.
You can hear actual stories from students and recruiters, read news articles and factual reports on the for-profit college industry at our website here: http://www.forprofitu.org
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