Leonardtown High School English Department Chair Colleen Gill
Leonardtown, MD — High school students in St. Mary’s County Public Schools (SMCPS) had better beware. For the last few years the school system has been using a software program that looks out for incidents of plagiarism. Great Mills High School several years ago initiated use of the Turnitin Software Service. It was so successful that it rolled out to the other two high schools, Chopticon and Leonardtown.
At its June 24 meeting, the St. Mary’s County Board of Education approved extending what had been a year-to-year contract to three years at an annual cost of $19,746.42. At the meeting, Leonardtown High School English Department Chair Colleen Gill assured the board that teachers don’t want to be “the plagiarism police,” but instead the program is used as a teaching opportunity.
Gill gave an example of a student whose sister had graduated and gone on to college. That student turned in a paper that had been written and turned in by her sister when she was in high school. Gill said that it was explained to that student the error of her ways.
According to information supplied to the school by Assistant Superintendent of Instruction Dr. Jeff Maher, “The Turnitin service provides a plagiarism prevention tool that allows academic institutions to easily determine if students are writing and submitting original work. Turnitin searches the Internet as well as their proprietary databases of papers and digital texts for sources of potential plagiarism. The service then generates a custom originality report that highlights and provides links to any textual matches found on the Internet, in the databases of previously submitted papers and/or in the proprietary databases of subscription-based publication material from content aggregators with whom they are partnered.”
Maher and Gill insisted that the program had features other than the plagiarism component that made it valuable. It includes “GradeMark, which “is a time-saving alternative to traditional pen and paper grading, making it easy for instructors to give students the valuable, time-sensitive feedback that is so essential for building quality writing skills.”
In response to a question from school board member Cathy Allen, Gill said the program allowed for teachers to grade papers on their laptops or tablets while they are home or elsewhere doing other chores, like attending their own children’s soccer games. She assured Allen that the responses to the students are a lot quicker than the traditional method of writing on papers and handing them in to the students.
Another feature of Turnitin is called “Peermark,” which is an online peer reviewing system that “gives instructors the ability to create peer review assignments that students use to evaluate and learn from one another’s work.”
During the past school year the program evaluated the work of more than 4,000 students and more than 25,000 of their submissions. It was used to grade almost 12,000 papers.
According to Turnitin’s website http://turnitin.com/ there are ten different types of plagiarism, from submitting another’s work word-for-word to a variety of other combinations. Gill said that sometimes students turn in work that is partially their own and very good and partially plagiarized. She said the opportunity is used to explain to the students the value of producing their own work.
The Bay Net was unable to determine at press time whether any student has ever been suspended or expelled for plagiarism.
According Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, “Within academia, plagiarism by students professors, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud and offenders are subject to academic censure, up to and including expulsion. Many institutions use plagiarism detection software to uncover potential plagiarism and to deter students from plagiarizing.”
Turnitin and a companion program are used by more than 15,000 institutions in 140 countries.
Contact Dick Myers at dick.myers@thebaynet.com