Blogger accused iParadigms of arming both sides in the war on plagiarism

iParadigms LLC's two major products as Turnitin, used by thousands of universities since 1996 to help profs detect the plagiarism that has proliferated since the arrival of the Internet, and Writecheck. Says blogger Alex Tabarrok writes of Writecheck, "What is less well appreciated is that Turnitin also sells its services to students. In fact, students whose professors use Turnitin are encouraged to pre-submit their work to Writecheck which will analyze and 'verify' for the students that their paper has 'properly quoted, summarized or paraphrased' previous work and it will also relieve students from 'worrying that their paper will be recycled without their knowledge.' Uh huh." Tabarrok claims that Writecheck enables clever students to tweak their plagiarized papers to avoid Turnitin detection. The e-zine "Inside Higher Education" recently ran a piece based on Tabarrok's blog accusation. The article quotes Jonathan Bailey, founder of PlagiarismToday.com, to the effect that the fight against plagiarism is a sort of academic "arms race."

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Those of us who are fortunate enough to have small classes --- my honors course this fall, "Theories of Justice and the American Common Law," has ten honor students and I'm team-teaching it with the chair of the Political Science Department (eat your hearts out, you who face amphitheaters full of students) --- assignments can be shaped and tailored such that no amount of Googling will get the students anything like the assignments. Our students will read excerpts on justice from the great philosophers, e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Hume and Bentham. They then will be presented with real court decisions, which they are asked to pretend have been appealed to a higher court, where the justices on the bench are these self-same famous philosophers. They then are required to write the opinions they think each of these famed "jurists" would pen. Try plagiarizing that one!