More than six months after Senate approved a policy for the use of text-matching software, the university administration is within three weeks of finalizing a purchase order with Turnitin.com, says Dr. Laura Winer, Senior Educational Technologist at the Office of the Deputy Provost and Chief Information Officer.
According to Winer, the DP-CIO had hoped to have a contract in place by the start of Fall term, but renewed concerns over student privacy forced the office to review the Turnitin software.
"If we hadn't made any changes, the contract would've been active by now," said Winer.
The forthcoming contract is now expected to become active in January.
Legal Services, which has been working with the DP-CIO and the Dean of Students to create the Turnitin contract, voiced concerns that the anti-plagiarism software violated provincial privacy law by storing students' personal information on corporate servers.
Turnitin.com, which claims over 2500 institutional users, compares newly submitted papers to those in its database of previously submitted work. It then generates "originality reports" flagging potential instances of plagiarism.
In response to the legal concerns, the university will now store student data on campus servers. Professors seeking additional information about matched papers or their authors will be required to file formal requests, the guidelines for which are still in development.
Winer emphasized that the administration has tried to create a program that all students will accept.
"[Turnitin.com] has been misportrayed as punitive, and that really is not where this is coming from," she said. "One of the things we've done is make sure that [students'] anonymity is totally protected."
Nonetheless, many students are likely to maintain their past objections to text-matching software. Trial use of Turnitin has met in past years with heavy criticism from those who claimed the program violated intellectual-property rights and fostered an atmosphere of mistrust.
