December 3, 2020
http://cuny.is/againstturnitinThis testimony will be submitted to the Board of Trustees on December 7th for review prior to the December 14th meeting, during which the above resolution will be considered.
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We, the undersigned faculty, students, and staff at the City University of New York, express our opposition to the resolution that the CUNY Board of Trustees allocate $1,985,050 over the next five years to renew the university’s contract with Turnitin.
Our opposition is based on the following four principles: (1) misunderstanding about the nature and intent of this software, as represented in the resolution; (2) Turnitin’s violation of the CUNY University Faculty Senate’s Resolution Affirming the Privacy of Learning Data and Principles for Working with Third-Party Vendors, approved in May 2020; (3) the lack of consultation with relevant and interested faculty, staff, and student groups across CUNY; and (4) the questionable wisdom of a commitment by the university to the exorbitant cost of this contract during a moment of fiscal crisis.
What Turnitin Is and Is Not
The resolution refers to Turnitin as “plagiarism detection software,” a claim that the company disputes on its own website: “So does Turnitin detect plagiarism? No - Turnitin offers a tool that helps educators (and their students) make informed evaluations of student work rapidly and move on to the important task of discerning what their students need in the way of instruction, correction or judicial action.” Turnitin estimates the likelihood of document similarity, which is a poor method of evaluating originality of writing, not an accurate enough measure of similarity to determine authenticity, insufficient as a means of determining student motivation, and empirically less effective than instructor intervention to improve student writing. Moreover, Turnitin’s accuracy is itself disputed. A University of Texas, Austin study finds that Turnitin is marginally more effective than a 10-word Google search, which requires less instructor training and significantly lower cost. Turnitin’s accuracy is marginally greater than a coin toss.
Despite five years of use, CUNY has presented no research or data to confirm its claims that Turnitin has “operated successfully (as a plagiarism detection software) to date.” Research at other colleges and universities has shown that instructor interventions were far more effective deterrents to plagiarism. Furthermore, research on student experience with Turnitin as a formative writing tool has noted a decline in student fluency with citation, paraphrasing, and summarizing. In fact, some studies point to the likelihood that the use of Turnitin increases students’ hesitancy to attempt quoting or paraphrasing for fear of being “caught” plagiarizing.
Turnitin has not been proven to be an effective method for supporting academic integrity or a vehicle for strengthening student writing, and the product’s lack of transparency prevents necessary validation of its claims.
Violation of University Faculty Senate Resolution Affirming Privacy of Learning Data
Turnitin’s value comes from the data it collects and stores, as evidenced by Advance Publication’s $1.75B purchase of Turnitin in March 2019. Turnitin builds its content database using the student work that is run through the system without allowing individuals to opt-out of such use. Its profit model is entirely dependent on absorbing the intellectual property of students into its proprietary database of content without seeking meaningful consent or providing compensation. Now owned by a media data company, there is increased potential for misuse of the student-generated content (data) that undergirds the technology service. Turnitin is NOT the same company today that it was in 2015 when CUNY entered its previous contract.
The renewal of the existing Turnitin contract violates the principles endorsed by the CUNY University Faculty Senate in its Resolution Affirming the Privacy of Learning Data and Principles for Working with Third-Party Vendors (May 2020). The UFS principles are an effort to ensure the ethical use of student data and they reflect a growing concern about data collected by third-party vendors contracted by CUNY to provide educational technology services. The CUNY student population, which includes undocumented immigrants and members of other marginalized communities, may be particularly vulnerable to privacy risks associated with digital technologies. Faculty and student consultation in the selection of technology tools that are integral to the core functions of the university is necessary to protect the integrity of our research, teaching, and learning activities.
The UFS resolution sets forth a set of principles and practices that include: ownership, ethical use, transparency, freedom of expression, protection, and access/control. The practices specify that users (students and faculty) will own the data generated through use of educational technologies; that service providers will not sell or otherwise monetize user data; and that users will control the use of their own intellectual property. The UFS resolution also calls on CUNY and its Office of General Counsel to “assure that commercial third-party products and services contracted by the University conform to these principles and practices.” The blanket renewal of a 2015 contract with Turnitin, while ignoring the changed landscape of the educational technology market, runs afoul of the UFS principles of data ownership and the ethical use of student data and should be opposed.
Consultation of Relevant Expert Groups
The resolution claims that campuses were consulted on the renewal of the contract with TurnItin, but the nature of this consultation is unclear. Several relevant university-wide bodies were not consulted, including the Committee on Academic Technology, the Council of Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinators, the Center for Teaching and Learning Council, the Library and Information Technology Committee of the University Faculty Senate, and the University Student Senate. CUNY also is home to hundreds of faculty researchers in the field of composition and rhetoric whose work raises relevant questions about the efficacy of plagiarism detection services in both protecting academic integrity and helping students grow as writers. These groups have expertise supporting, researching, designing, and using solutions for the pedagogical challenges this resolution is meant to address. Many faculty, staff, and students believe that Turnitin harms students as writers while unethically seizing and monetizing their intellectual property. The resolution suggests a consensus around the desire for this software that does not exist.
Fiscal Context
CUNY is experiencing devastating budget uncertainty, with expanding class sizes, hundreds of non-renewed adjunct faculty, and indefinitely delayed contractual step-increases for faculty and staff. This resolution commits the university to spending $1,985,050 for a service it has not demonstrated that it needs, funding that could be better used to hire faculty, staff writing centers, and support faculty development initiatives that sustain financial investments over time by building institutional knowledge and expertise.
At a time of major fiscal crisis, it is unconscionable that the university would invest such significant resources on a contract that runs counter to the academic principles at the heart of its mission.
FULL VERSION OF STATEMENT AND SIGNATURES APPEAR AT
http://cuny.is/againstturnitin.
