The following is a Letter to the Editor for the Opinions section, written by second-year Eli Marietta.
40 percent. I backed away from the screen. Did I really plagiarize 40 percent of my paper? I had painstakingly scanned and cited all of my sources, so how was it possible that I had stolen from other authors?
The answer: without fail, every single “violation” was made when I happened to cite the same quote as another author. It was an accusation that has led me down a rabbit hole and made me believe we need to radically reform the way students and teachers both talk about and prosecute plagiarism.
The computer program that pegged me as a plagiarist is called Turnitin. It has steadily increased in popularity since its founding in 1997, now boasting more than 30 million current users. The platform works by detecting identical phrases among submissions and online texts. This can be a valuable tool for professors seeking to discern plagiarism in the classroom or students who want to check that they didn’t accidentally copy a previous author.
But the algorithm is misleading. It automatically counts any quote another author used as plagiarism, as if once an author quotes a text it belongs to them. For example, if I quoted anything from the Declaration of Independence, then I would most likely be labeled as plagiarizing because at least one prior author has most likely quoted the same excerpt.
This segment of the algorithm exists because a student could easily read a quote in an article, cite the original source and pretend as if they had never read the article. Nevertheless, this behavior is the exception, not the norm.
The software itself is not inherently problematic—it is the context in which it is utilized. Michael Huang, a fourth-year at DU, had quotes detected as plagiarism but was told by his professor, “If it [rates you] more than 13 percent, I’m not looking at it.” Students should not be punished for professors’ ignorance. DU should educate teachers to not view the percentage at face value and only investigate themselves if “violations” are more than previously-used quotes.
New terminology should be invented to suit these circumstances, as the word ‘plagiarism’ intrinsically connotes a concerted effort to steal. I propose “convergence,” a biological term employed when independent species develop similar adaptations to one another. In this way, a student who has happened to use the same quote as another author is not assumed to have stolen, they merely arrived at a similar conclusion, thus committing convergence.
It would be one thing if students and teachers had equal access to this service, but Turnitin’s revenue comes from schools purchasing licenses. When I attempted to use the service myself, I was directed to a page that presumed I had been given access by an institution. I had certainly not been.
“I cannot use Turnitin, but surely there are other plagiarism checkers I can use,” I thought. However, after submitting my paper to the five most popular plagiarism checkers other than Turnitin, I received percentages ranging from zero to 21 percent. While these aren’t fruitless substitutes, I was left with a minimum of 19 percent that I could still be accused of plagiarism for.
Until students and teachers have equal access, students will be unable to adequately protect themselves from plagiarism accusations. “Ignorance is no excuse” was the phrase repeated back to me over and over as I pleaded my case with my professor, but without the same tools as teachers, ignorance is inevitable.
Teachers who use Turnitin have been rightfully criticized in the past for operating under a presumption of guilt—guilty until proven innocent—which was also the guiding principle in my case. I was forced to procure evidence that I had not plagiarized articles, even though such evidence is impossible to create. Turnitin strives to remove plagiarism, but it is instead being used to create a cruel game of he said, she said between teachers and students that students are doomed to lose.
At this point, you may be asking yourself: “Given everything I just read, why didn’t you just bring this case before the University of Denver?” That’s where this story takes a downright nefarious turn. I was informed by my professor that I could bring my case before the Student Review Board but with one big catch. If the board decided I was guilty, I risked expulsion from the University.
Even if the chance of expulsion is zero percent, 99 percent of the people in my situation wouldn’t have taken that chance either. As much as the system prosecuting plagiarism needs to be reformed, it is not worth the catastrophic financial implications I would face from being expelled. This system protects itself from reform by disincentivizing anyone from challenging it and forcing those who do so to put their future on the line.
If DU is going to use Turnitin, they need to explain to teachers what the service actually measures and provide equal access to students. Students should not face expulsion for challenging plagiarism accusations, as it eliminates positive reform. If either of these issues remains unfixed, cases will soar like the student debt at DU and beyond.
