Not speaking to how to address cheating, but I found this interesting:
> The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission
But later...
> And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want better tools.
So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of employment, so it's almost certainly not actually his, and it was arguably licensed to students by the university) is bad, but submitting their content to a service that retains a copy and profits off it isn't?
These are tools for teachers to catch plagiarism. He is saying he wants better tools to detect plagiarism because these don’t handle similarity matches well.
My point was that he griped about students posting old exams, but had no problem with schools sharing students' work with plagiarism detection services. He didn't even recognize how it could be a problem.
Well, it was long enough without that tangent. But what he did say was he writes his own plagiarism detection tools. He certainly wasn’t praising those services.
This was one of the reasons why the use of such tools was strictly prohibited at my former university.
Another argument given was:
even if you only have to *think* about using such a tool you are already in a situation where good scientific practices is no longer guaranteed. In other words: if you/the students would have followed all rules of good scientific practise right from the beginning, you would never need to use such a tool.
But I guess if you are the developer of such a tool or work in that area of research, you probably see things differently...
Also; how many different ways are there to explain rules on scientific practices within 150 word? How much similarities would you expect from O(100) different students - even if they write independently? - I'm not sure if that is taken into account in such tools.
On a different scale: when piping e.g. a typical PhD thesis though such a tool, the first introductory paragraphs will always have red flags (simply because that topic was already introduced 10000 times and everyone read more or less the same introductory textbooks).
The important part - the main part of the thesis - of course should be unique (but if the supervisor/examist/committee is not able to "detect" this in their own, well...).
Of course literally copy&paste an introduction is still not okay. But -as the blogger also said- this can easily detected by issuing a simple yawhoogle search in case the text already reads suspicious (e.g. if the style of writing varies a lot between paragraphs etc).
So yes, I'd agree that the use of such tools is relatively limited when it comes to "real" scientific works but in this particular case it was quite neat to see how easily you can use it to atomatise the collection of evidences if you have a large class of students...
Faculty likely still owns copyright (or the school does) for teaching materials.
Fair use covers the school's use of students work. Submission to such services might also be construed as fair use. It seems to have been litigated as such already:
Tests are explicitly mentioned in the list of works make for hire, but it's also within the scope of employment, so it's double counted.
> If a work is made for hire, the employer...is the initial owner of the copyright unless both parties involved have signed a written agreement to the contrary.
> The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission
But later...
> And, sometimes as a professor who has access to online plagiarism tools like turnitin or safe-assign, you just want better tools.
So students submitting "your" content (it was produced as part of employment, so it's almost certainly not actually his, and it was arguably licensed to students by the university) is bad, but submitting their content to a service that retains a copy and profits off it isn't?