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Unless the student has agreed to their work being kept by
turnitin.com - or any other website - keeping their work is indeed
a violation of copyright law. How do you and your school get away
with being an accessory to that?

No matter what reason turnitin offers for doing so, they are yet
keeping intellectual property that is not theirs to keep.
Unless your institution or you make that clear to students in
advance. Do you? Do you or your school have students agree to
giving their work into the continued keeping of this privately
owned website?

> I can only answer for TurnItIn, not other websites. This
> software comes as part of Blackboard, my course management
> software, and is paid for by the state board of education.
>
> 1. I have it set that a student can submit a paper as a "draft" -
> so the student can see the results; the student can correct
> problems and repost (or not, and I'll see the problem areas).
> 2. Yes, the software does keep a digital copy of the paper.
> This is done ONLY to protect that student against future
> plagiarism. It is never done with an eye to publishing that
> material in the future. It's more secure than publishing to a
> website or blog or chat session.
> 3. TurnItIn merely shows text that appears to be similar to
> something else. It is the INSTRUCTOR'S job to ascertain whether
> that similarity is by chance (pretty frequent for some common
> phrases), honestly (a quotation), or dishonestly (inadvertent or
> outright copying of bodies of text). We EXPECT our students to
> learn to quote from experts - why wouldn't we want our students
> to do that?
>
> In my English Comp. I & II courses, students write essays and
> literary analyses, frequently on well known works. Of course
> there's going to be phrases in common when the work is Young
> Goodman Brown or Hamlet Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I realize
> that and take the plagiarism percentage with a box of salt - I
> always check the specifics.
>
> When TurnItIn finds entire sentences, paragraphs, and page in the
> same order as another document, and there are no quotations, then
> that software is doing its job, and it's doing it SO much better
> than typing suspicious phrases into google. Ultimately, it's my
> job as the instructor to decide what's done correctly, regardless
> of a software's report.
>
> I find 2 to 3 cases of overt and purposeful plagiarism every
> semester through TurnItIn; the college administration has never,
> ever disagreed with my findings, when backed up with the report.
> Yes, that has meant a few students didn't graduate on time, and a
> few more students have been dismissed from the college. Yes, I
> have found papers that had been copied from earlier semesters,
> word for word.
>
> So, in all respect to your coworker; I believe she's using
> software to avoid part of her responsibility - to put the
> discerning eye of judgement upon the matter. I suggest you try
> TurnItIn or some other plagiarism software for yourself,
> particularly when partnered with Grademark, which allows digital
> marking and grading of the paper.
>
> I don't have a classroom full of computers and don't expect my
> students to handwrite every one of their assignments. We do a
> few assignments like that, but TurnItIn allows my students some
> flexibility in where and when, which they greatly appreciate.

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