I’ve returned to school part time in February 2006, and out of 39 2/3 semester hours since then, this is my first grade below an A-. I’ve completed 68 2/3 semester hours total with a cumulative GPA of 3.43, and I’ve finally satisfied all of the requirements for an Associate of Arts in Mathematics degree. An AA degree won’t really do anything for me, but I suppose it’s a milestone on the way to my BS degree.

I will need to have a transcript sent from De Anza to Mission College, pay for a transcript evaluation, and apply for graduation. I won’t actually receive the degree until the end of May at the earliest.

I was somewhat startled to see the high rates of plagiarism that are claimed, but upon reflection I suppose I am not actually too surprised. People are always looking for a quick and easy alternative to tasks they don’t want to perform. I have never turned in plagiarized work, and have no desire to do so. In fact, I’ve never really considered plagiarizing until I was forced to use Turnitin. Even absent the use of a service like Turnitin, I would be far too worried that plagiarism would be detected, and that I would fail the course, be expelled, or have a degree revoked. The potential penalty for detected plagiarism is simply far too costly to justify saving a bit of time now.

However, I am very unhappy about having to submit my work via Turnitin, and their storage of my work in a database. Supporters of Turnitin generally claim that their use of student’s works is not copyright infringement, based on arguments that are dubious at best. Here is the response I posted on Slashdot to such claims:

The argument that Turnitin is not infringing is flawed for at least two reasons:

1. Copyright infringement doesn’t require publication. If you rent a DVD and make a copy of it, you have almost certainly infringed copyright, even though you haven’t “published” the work by making your copy available to any third party. In a copyright infringement lawsuit relating to a work with a registered copyright, publication may result in a larger award of actual damages, but has nothing to do with whether infringement occurred.
2. As I understand it, Turnitin does republish the work, or at least fragments of it. If someone submits a paper, and Turnitin finds some degree of match with another paper in their database, reportedly Turnitin will supply the matched paper or excerpts from it to the course instructor.

I am currently taking a course that requires me to submit my papers to Turnitin. My objection to Turnitin is that they are not only infringing my copright, but that they are doing so for commercial profit. If they want to make money from storing my paper in a database, they should pay me for a license.I carefully read the Turnitin terms and conditions when I signed up for the account. I was particularly concerned that I might be forced to agree to terms that grant them a license to my work, although arguably if I was forced to enter the agreement in order to take a college course, the agreement might not be legally binding. However, there were no such terms in the agreement. The agreement primarily said that I would not make improper use of Turnitin’s intellectual property, something that I have no interest in doing.

Every paper I submit to Turnitin contains the statement “Copyright 2006 Eric Smith. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be stored in a database or electronic retrieval system without explicit written permission of the author.”

After the course is over, and I have received my degree from the college (expected in December), I plan to send a registered letter to Turnitin demanding that they delete my papers from the database and provide some evidence that they have done so. I expect to either get no response, or a response stating that they will not comply. At that point I’ll consider legal action.

Another claim of Turnitin’s non-infringement is that their storage of student’s papers in their database is covered as Fair Use. This argument fails also, as pointed out by various other Slashdot commentators, including jackbird:

It fails two of the four pillars of fair use on its face – Commercial use (yes) and Substantiality (all of it).

Stanford University offers a great resource on Copyright and Fair Use, including a detailed description of the Four Factors (pillars).

Other commentators point out that a service like that of Turnitin is necessary because of the immensity of the plagiarism problem. That argument makes no sense. The fact that there is a problem with unauthorized copying of student papers does not justify the existence of a commercial enterprise whose business model consists of unauthorized (and unlawful) copying of student papers.

Some Universities are subscribing to plagiarism detection services despite serious misgivings by their own faculty.  Several faculty members of Grand Valley State University wrote a paper “Issues Raised by Use of TurnItIn Plagiarism Detection Software” describing their concerns.  They point out that a student at McGill University actually succeeded in a legal challenge to the requirement that his papers had to be submitted via Turnitin.

In the essay, Brad describes what a wonderful teacher and water polo coach he has always heard Rick to be, then his initial confrontation with Rick when he tries out for the water polo team. Rick is described as being unfriendly, imposing, and menacing, and this perception causes Brad to question his own adequacy. Throughout practice sessions, Rick is critical of Brad and unleashes venemous invectives upon him. Brad tries to quit the team, and Rick tells him brusquely that he can’t quit before the first game.

Brad decides to work his ass off, then quit the team after the first game, to show Rick what a good player he has lost by his callous treatment. The team wins the game, thanks to Brad scoring a record number of goals and making good defensive plays as well. After the game he is prepared to quit, when he sees Rick smiling for the first time, and congratuating him.

I made a point of not reading the other student’s reponses before posting my own. Almost everyone else focused on how Rick was just using a motivational technique to force Brad to really push himself to the limit. I don’t disagree with that, but unlike my classmates, I don’t find it admirable. My impression was that Rick was a manipulative, Machiavellian asshole. I compared him to the stereotypical boot camp drill seargeant abusing the inductees. Except that you would expect to graduate from boot camp in short order, and not have to deal with that drill seargeant further, while a coach should presumably be planning to work with his athletes for multiple semesters or years.

I found it interesting that one other student made the same comparison to boot camp, but based on actual experience in boot camp, while my comment was only based on stereotypes seen in film and television.

There are several people I could choose, but I am not able to describe them well enough to write a good essay, so I prefer to write an event. But most of the events that have had significant influence on me took place over longer intervals.

Finally I decided to write about the fire that happened while I was at work late one evening about six years ago, and my reaction to it. I wrote a rough draft this morning; this one is actually approximately the right length. The rough draft doesn’t have to be posted to the class site until September 14, but I’ve got a lot of other things to do over the next few weeks, so I don’t want to put it off to the last minute.

During the orientation, we were given a half hour to write an essay about an admired person. It took me a few minutes just to decide on a person about whom to write. The essay was not going to be graded or returned, but merely used by the instructor to determine whether it appears that any students may be especially in need of help.

I’m not comfortable writing about family members. Ultimately I decided to write about Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. He has clearly done more to advance the cause of Free Software than any other person, and although Free Software existed before he started the FSF, the concept had not been formalized.

I am not accustomed to writing essays with pen and paper (how quaint!), so I got writer’s cramp fairly quickly. I was using narrow-ruled paper but wrote double-spaced to leave room for the inevitable corrections. By the end of the half hour, I had written four pages, but hadn’t quite addressed all of the points I’d intended.

I actually enjoyed writing the essay, despite the use of pen and paper, and think I may want to expand it into a blog entry, so after class I explained that to Professor Lang and asked if I might get the essay back after he has read it. He readily assented.

The course is divided into four modules. The first module has a primary assignment of writing an autobiographical essay, and several lesser assignments, the first of which was to write a short (minimum 300 word) self-introduction to share with the class. I started working on it this morning, focusing on why I have returned to school and what my educational goals are. After about 90 minutes, I had completed what I considered to be a reasonably polished essay. However, the length was over 2500 words. While no maximum length was stated, this clearly seemed too long given the stated minimum of 300 words. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” I had to edit it ruthlessly, which is always painful when one has put a lot of effort into the writing. I reduced it to under 700 words, and posted it to the class forum.

It would be nice if the longer form of the essay could be used as the autobiographical essay assignment, or at least as the basis for that assignment, but unfortunately I don’t think that will work. The instructions for the assignment state that the essay should focus on a particular person or event (single day or less) in one’s life, and my essay does neither.

I’m having a difficult time deciding what person or event to write about. I’m not particularly good at writing descriptive prose, so I think I am somewhat more likely to be successful writing about an event rather than a person, but I’m at a loss to identify any particularly defining event in my life. Certainly there have been moments with particular emotional significance, but I don’t feel like any of those events have really changed my life in a major way.