Students disagree adding their assignments to Turnitin database
McLean High Students highly expressed their disagreement to submit their research papers on California company plagiarism checker Turnitin.com. The Turnitin database contains 22 million papers of students around the world. The plagiarism detector scans research papers submitted to its database, search for duplicate phrases, grades the paper, and then add the checked research paper to its database. The McLean High School announced that they will be using the service to detect activities of plagiarism among the students. The students have been rebelling against the idea of adding their papers to the database. However, they were not against the idea of condoning cheating.
Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights
Do students have rights over their assignments or submitted research papers? Is it true that adding their papers automatically to the Turnitin database is an infringement of intellectual property rights? Yes, submitting the assignment to the Turnitin plagiarism detector software is fair enough to facilitate catching up cheaters. However, the idea of grading the paper based on the frequency of duplicate content as well as adding the content automatically to the plagiarism software database is not fair.
The students do not like the idea of assumed guilt. They hated the idea of the school thinking that they were cheating. The idea of submitting the research papers to the Turnitin software was to catch cheaters and not to correct unintentional duplicate content. Whatever is the reason behind the duplicate content, the school does not have the absolute right to assume that students have been cheating. Moreover, the school does not have the right to allow Turnitin to add their research papers to its database without their permission because that is an infringement of their intellectual rights. That move alone is just like cheating. Storing someone else’s intellectual property without the permission of the author.