For this week’s Wow and Wonder post, I decided to expand and comment on Jim Luke’s “That’s No Plagiarism Checker” blog post and the company Turnitin. 

As someone who graduated online and completed my first year of university entirely online, I am utterly shocked at the intentions behind Turnitin. I understand with school being online, students have more opportunities to cheat, however, students should not be punished for this new era we have entered. It is disheartening to hear that Turnitin is a program that now intends to eliminate faculty members and replace them with a system that has the ability to provide “feedback” to students. Personally, this made me think “Wow”, this is a slap in the face to students. We devote an immense portion of our lives to completing assignments, losing sleep over them and making sure they are completed to the best of our ability. To think a system would be ‘reading’ these papers, potentially rejecting the many perspectives and ideas students bring forth is something that does not sit right with me. I believe this diminishes the work of students and if students were to hear a robotic system was grading and providing feedback, their work ethic would significantly drop. So many students bring different ideas to a topic and I just don’t see how a system could accurately account for the diverse perspectives students bring forth. Also, I feel as though this is disrespectful to professors who have spent their lives learning and perfecting their subjects in order to be able to effectively offer help and feedback to students. The work that they do should not be compared to the work of a system, in my eyes, they are simply irreplaceable and a system should not be made in an attempt to be able to replace them. 

I “Wonder” if we will begin to see an increasing popularity of this system amongst schools as an attempt to save money and make even more profit. I do not agree with this, however, I would not be surprised if we started to see a decline in faculty members and an increase of software programs that supposedly do the job of faculty members.