Is it ethical for a teacher to submit students' work without their knowledge?
4 replies
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Kate Tworek My feeling is that students should always be made aware that their work may be submitted to Turnitin as part of their institution's assessment processes. How this is communicated to students is at the discretion of the institution.
Certainly not getting students involved in the process I feel is a lost opportunity to open up a discussion with them about academic integrity and ethical use of sources.
What do others on the forum think?
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Just checking the work I don't think is really a concern, but submitting student work to be stored in the Turnitin repository without their knowledge is concerning and not something I would recommend that instructors do (though it is definitely a grey area). If this is something that the instructor plans to do for a class, the best practice would be to put in the syllabus or wherever your course information lives. Something like "work submitted to assignments may be submitted and stored in the Turnitin institutional repository".
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We're trying to create a policy to address this situation: If a Teacher has not anticipated needing to use Turnitin but wants to see a similarity report on a certain student’s writing, is it ethical for the Teacher to submit the student’s work without that student’s knowledge/consent? Because of the way Turnitin is integrated into our LMS, in order to submit a student's work, the teacher must check a box that states “This assignment submission is my own, original work.” So the question is: Should faculty be prohibited from doing this?
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To me, the key question behind this is does the institution see Turnitin as the Similarity police, or does it see it as a writing support tutor? The former could be involved in undercover ops, the latter would be always open & presented via the benefits to the student.