ABSTRACT
Plagiarism detection services (PDSs) are pervasive and widely adopted at institutions of higher learning across the globe. Using a PDS impacts students by creating and perpetuating an environment of fear and punishment about plagiarism, which is both ineffective and counterproductive for reducing it. PDSs emerged in the late 1990s as a response to alleged increases in copy-and-paste plagiarism that were tied to the rapid proliferation of the Internet. Students and parents have also voiced concerns about text-matching services and have even gone so far as to sue Turnitin and demand an option to opt out of submitting student work to the program. Instructors can use a text-matching report to discuss how students should approach passages the report has highlighted and how students can appropriately cite information from others. Thinking about best practices for avoiding plagiarism and adapting those methods to repurpose text-matching services is part of a long conversation we must have in the coming years.
