It is 6 a.m. and you have just peeled yourself out of bed and are now staring at a blank page on your computer screen. Attempting to keep your eyes open and your brain working, you grab the thing nearest to you: caffeine. In three hours, you are supposed to have a paper completely written and ready to turn in, full of insights and mind-altering conclusions.
When we reach this point, most of us are hating life. Writer’s block sets in, and we decide it would be much easier just to use someone else’s paper. This, however, cannot be done. Why? Because of a little invention Cal State Long Beach has recently implemented known as Turnitin.
This is a program teachers use to check any and all written work by students for forgery. Cheating is rampant thoughout college campuses and we all have seen, know of others or have in fact ourselves cheated in class. This plague has infested CSULB, which is why Turnitin has been brought in to cure this disease.
Plagiarism should not be allowed. When one plagiarizes, they are no longer thinking for themselves. In college, we as students are supposed to be developing our own view on the world and expanding our knowledge. This does not happen when we regurgitate other people’s ideas. The need for a program like Turnitin is blatantly evident. As a student, I wonder how fair this program is for us.
Say you are asked to write a paper about a topic discussed in class. You use your notes, just like any other student. Assuming that at least one other person in the class was not sleeping, there is a strong chance that they took the same exact notes as you did. Then, when the two of you write your papers, you convey the same idea and use many of the same phrases and word choices. When you turn your papers into Turnitin, they are checked against each other and you fail to pass the plagiarism guidelines. Your teacher then has to fail you, a policy that many teachers have. How then are you supposed to prove that you did not copy the other person’s paper? It is your word against Turnitin. Who do you think the teacher is going to believe?
As stated earlier, the Turnitin program will take a student’s paper and check it against all papers turned in from the class, papers from other colleges and all other papers written on the Internet or from Turnitin’s database. Those are a lot of papers to make sure that your paper does not match. The likelihood that nobody else has ever written or thought of the same idea seems idealistic, thus it is difficult to see how your paper would pass this program.
I can honestly say I have never turned in someone else’s work. But I have to admit I worry that my paper might be similar to another student’s paper simply based on the topic we write on. How thorough is Turnitin?’
I feel as though there should be a preliminary turn-in, so that as a student we know where we should make changes. This would ensure that the writing we turn in is our own. It would be a way to check that those of us who do write our own papers will not be accused of plagiarizing.
I understand the necessity of the program, however, it is a black and white situation, you pass or fail. There seems to be no room for slight error. If there was a way for us to have a practice run, a way to check our papers, this would ensure that we as students are thinking for ourselves and expressing our own thoughts and ideas, which is exactly what the teachers want us to do.
Jenna McDaniel is a junior art education major and a weekly columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
