Turnitin Makes Its Ivy League Debut

Turnitin, an online antiplagiarism tool, can count thousands of colleges and high schools among its devoted clients. But the service had never gotten a whiff of some of academe's most hallowed halls until now.

When a Harvard official told The Harvard Crimson that Turnitin is being called on to vet papers in a sociology course, the university became the first member of the Ivy League to acknowledge giving the service a test run. Harvard officials said Turnitin was being used, at the request of a professor, only in the "Law and Social Movements" course.

Ivy League colleges have been reluctant to submit essays to Turnitin, in part because it adds the papers to its database without reimbursing the students who wrote them. In fact, Harvard officials made that very argument against Turnitin in October: "We do not think giving another company rights to hold student work is necessarily a good thing," said John Ellison, an assistant dean.

Other Ivy League officials — including those at colleges that ask students to sign academic honor codes — have said Turnitin cultivates a culture of distrust between professors and students.

Turnitin hasn't exactly endeared itself to the Ivy League, either. This year officials at Princeton University announced that they wouldn't be comfortable using the software, citing their own honor code and echoing Mr. Ellison's concerns about protecting students' work. In response, Turnitin's founder, John Barrie, excoriated the institution in The Daily Princetonian, its student newspaper.

"It's a shame that schools like Princeton aren't taking the lead because they're too concerned about what they are going to find," he said. "They are the top schools that would need to use it, because as the prestige of the institution increases, so does the amount of cheating." –Brock Read