I took a look at Rebecca Moore Howard's blog. She was an expert witness in the McLean suit brought by two students against Turnitin. I agree with lynn168's post and also wonder how anyone can ethically and effectively use SafeAssign or Turnitin? Teachers would be casting students as would-be criminals rather than inexperienced writers. It seems these programs police plagiarism, but are also hobbling the learning process, the "writer-text collaborative experience" as Howard describes.
How can these programs effectively catch a student cheating by using percentages? Using a virtual vault to house thousands of student papers and anteing up rhetorical coincidences through percentages to establish guilt seems ominous. Here's another blog I checked out in reference to the McLean suit. It is a virtual community of responses to the case.
Also, in affirmative response to erenghard's post, I don't get page 11 of Howard's book. I don't understand how the plagiarized paragraph is plagiarism. I showed the page in question to my professor that I G.A. for and she couldn't see it either. Anyone have a clue?
3 comments:
I will try to be succinct. The original passage reads: "One is a medical teaching film showing the birth of a baby; the other is an anthropological documentary of a subincision initiation rite practiced by a primitive Australian group." The patchwritten passage reads (I omit quotations for illustration purposes): One was a medical teaching film showing the birth of a baby; the other was an anthropological documentary of a subincision initiation rite practiced by a primitive Australian group.
Notice anything similar here? Better yet, what's different? There are no quotation marks, and the only real change is the tense.
But proper citation of the source is given.
A block quote (one without quotation marks) still requires an exact rendering of the source. Substituting synonyms, changing the tense, or introducing indirect speech does not accurately reflect the source. It really does not matter that the writer included the citation; this selection is clearly an example of plagiarism.
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