Letters and Emails
During the past four years, the three C's have been ingrained in my coursework as well as my extracurricular activities at this great university. However, an event this quarter has forced me to rethink my total acceptance of two of the C's and to ask if the university has pulled a fast one on its students.
Competence and conscience deal with members of our community engaging in a free and honest search for the truth. We do this through discussion, reading and through the writing of papers. The term paper is part of the teacher/student relationship. Unfortunately, some faculty members who find this honest search for the truth abhorrent and they use a service called turnitin.com, that is paid for by the university. Some of these professors require all of the students in the class to submit their papers to this company. The paper is then checked for plagiarism by comparing the information in the paper with a stored database. A score on a scale of 1-5 is then issued. The concept of conscience has been reduced to a five-point scale.
Competence and conscience also deal with trust. This service weakens the trusting bond between the professor and the student. It is insulting to me that a professor would feel that I plagiarize materials or that I would steal the work of another student. Those of us who truly believe in the three C's do not do these kinds of things.
In a practical sense, technology has decreased our privacy. When we submit information to turnitin.com, we have no idea who sees the information or where it goes. For instance, who gets the report besides the student and the teacher? How long does the information remain in the database? What is to stop a term paper writing service from stealing the papers and then marketing them?
Santa Clara is a community shaped by the ideas of competence, conscience and compassion. Professors using turnitin.com for all student papers are undermining the values of this great university. They need to stop this behavior and trust their students.
Chris Miller, history, '03