Moldy Peaches

The Mount Saint Vincent Students' Union is lobbying the university to prevent academic papers from being passed through a website designed to catch cheaters. The Halifax university is among 4,000 schools worldwide that use the subscription site turnitin.com to check whether a student's work is someone else's.

"They are going to be assumed guilty until they are otherwise proven innocent," said Chantal Brushett, president of the students' union at Mount Saint Vincent. "All of a sudden they're being accused of plagiarism when they don't even know what the word plagiarism means. I want a front-end approach, as opposed to a back-end approach."

Assignments are uploaded to the site. The program then checks each student's paper against a database of more than 4.5 billion pages of newspapers, academic journals, books and students' reports. If a paper has more than eight consecutive words in common with another source, the words are highlighted, alerting the instructor to possible plagiarism.

This case doesn't make any sense to me. Why is that individuals want to claim to be strong guardians of civil liberties in all the wrong cases. The Students' Union claim is no different than me stating that I don't want to be subject to security checks at the airport. Everyone is treated equally - with suspicion.

If, however, as was the case at McGill University a few years back, the students brought the complaint forward based on turnitin.com making a profit off their intellectual property that would be a different story. There was mention of that in their release, however, it was buried under the non-sense of guilty until proven innocent.

In an era where students can purchase papers from countless websites, I don't think it is unreasonable for the institution to be able to cross-reference their work.