OU students and faculty can expect a new way of checking student papers for plagiarism.

Turnitin.com, a Web-based plagiarism detection service, is being contracted by OU so professors can use the system.

Some feel the system is necessary because from 1999 to 2003, OU started to see an increase in academic misconduct cases, said Gregory Heiser, OU assistant provost.

"The cases are no longer increasing the way they were, but we need to stay on top of the situation," Heiser said.

The user can enter a phrase or upload a paper to the system, he said. It runs the material through a search engine which checks it against the Internet and the Turnitin.com database. The system highlights plagiarized material and gives the user a report.

"We do not want to do anything that would damage the mutual respect between students and faculty or that would lead students to believe they are under surveillance," Heiser said. "Professors do need a way to make sure a students' work is their own."

The system is designed to detect attempts to defeat the system by changing a few words here and there, Heiser said.

"For somebody who wants to go through the gyrations of changing somebody else's words until they are unrecognizable, there is no clear line between plagiarism and a kind of pathetic but legitimate approach to actually doing their own work," he said.

Heiser said the report includes material that has citation and needs to be looked at by a human being.

Heiser discussed Turnitin.com with the student honor council to see how receptive the students were to the idea, said Frederick Deeg, chemical engineering senior and Student Honor Council vice president.

Deeg said the council liked the detection service as a whole. He said he is neutral about the system but is leaning toward it.

"We trust everyone as much as we can the least trustworthy student," he said.

Deeg said Turnitin.com has a master database for all the universities connected to it. Any paper uploaded to the system is left in the database and added to the files.

He said the system does not keep the name of the student who wrote the paper, but it gives a link to the contact information of the university where the paper originated.

Joseph Buckles, University College freshman, said there are good and bad things about the system.

"The good thing is that it prevents plagiarism," he said. "The bad thing is that your information can be stored without your permission. There could be some problems with that."

Student work is stored on the Turnitin.com database without the student's knowledge if a professor uploads a paper to check for plagiarism without telling the student, Deeg said.

Heiser said there is not a plan to have students sign a waiver to tell students of this possibility.

All students own their work, according to OU copyright policy. Still, Heiser said OU retains a license to use student work for instructional purposes as long as it doesn't interfere with the market for student work.

"If someone felt that the market for their own work was being interfered with, then we would talk about that," he said.

The system will be available for students to check their work the same way that a professor would with this system.

Ezmeralda Lopez, psychology sophomore, said the system sounds like a great idea but said she does not think it would be widely used by students.

"We wait until the last minute to write our papers," Lopez said. "I would use it for a big research paper that I write ahead of time but not for daily work."

Heiser said professors are typically using Google.com to check student papers for plagiarism, but the problem with this system is that it is purely reactive.

"Some professors check all their papers on Google, others only use it when there is a suspicion," Heiser said. "This is another tool in the toolbox for professors."

The OU department of communication briefly used the system last year to test the service, Heiser said.

He said there will be a larger test of the system with the communication department and another unit sometime this semester.
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