Revisions for two documents, Due in 10 hrs from now!

The Administration,

Mary Lingram, Provost

Dear sir/madam

After soliciting opinions from members of the student’s council and the student body at large we have come to the conclusion that it is not right to use the software Turnitin as a plagiarism checker in our papers. After much consideration of the workings of the software it is obvious that it doesn’t support our interests as students but those of our instructors.

It has unethical implications in that the intellectual property that is the work of students is subjected to the software to determine whether it is plagiarized or it is original. This is very wrong and it demoralizes students because most do their do not duplicate papers but are poor in citations or rather referencing which contributes in their papers being termed as plagiarized. Student writers who are amateurs are so much affected because the software derails their effort instead of being a motivating factor to their work. (Garner, 2011) we still want the old traditional way of dealing with our instructors because they always point out our mistakes something that technology cannot do.

Secondly, this software uses other student’s previous work as a checker to our papers. It is not enough to use other students work to check the originality of our papers this is because similarities can occur in creation of sentences yet you did not use that source in your papers. In addition, the company is using those papers illegally majorly because they are the intellectual property of those students. It is very unethical and they compromise the right of those students by using their copyrighted materials. For instance there was a case filed by a student at the University of McGill over his intellectual property that the software was using, he won the case and Turnitin paid for the damages. The student got his rightful justice and this has led to numerous cases such as that whereby students are suing the company over their copyrighted papers and we don’t want to be victims of such ethical malpractices.

Consequently, Turnitin plagiarism checker brews hatred and animosity between the students and their professors this is because they will be viewing us as potentials plagiarist every time we submit our papers and on our part we will feel like the instructors don’t trust us enough (Baggaley, 2005). This mistrust has the potential of creating a hostile working environment between us the teachers and it should be a good one for success to be achieved.

Lastly, Turnitin Company has ignored its ethical implications to students and in turn created advertisements that show that they are ethically responsible to the environment by the amount of papers that students have submitted to their databases. This can be seen as deviation of the real problem by showcasing their positives that can stick in the mind of instructors. As it can be seen they do not care about the student’s welfare at all. We as the student’s body don’t want to be associated with this new plagiarism checker because we want to keep our ethics and integrity.

Sincerely,

The chairman,

The student’s council,

May 31, 2015

Reference

Garner, H. R. (2011, February). Combating unethical publications with plagiarism detection services. In Urologic Oncology: Seminars and Original Investigations (Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 95-99). Elsevier

Baggaley, J., & Spencer, B. (2005). The mind of a plagiarist. Learning, Media and Technology, 30(1), 55-62.