ASMSU officials are investigating a plagiarism-prevention Web site used by MSU's Lyman Briggs School to determine if the site is academically ethical.
ASMSU is MSU's undergraduate student government.
Turnitin.com, a prewriting tool designed to catch plagiarism errors in papers, is used by some instructors in the Lyman Briggs School.
Robert Murphy, ASMSU's Academic Assembly chairperson, said he learned of the Web site at a conference he attended in December.
"It was brought to my attention by Saginaw Valley State University," he said. "Their students were very concerned about their academic property."
Murphy said he heard the database could claim academic ownership of students' work, he told Academic Assembly members at its Jan. 31 meeting.
"It's something we need to look at," Murphy said.
But the database does not claim ownership of a student's paper, said Robert Shelton, an associate professor for the Lyman Briggs School.
It is a prewriting tool for students to check their work before turning it in to professors, he said. Shelton brought the program to the school after seeing it on ABC's "Nightline."
"What students do is turn their draft in to Turnitin.com before the professor even sees it. It's a spell-check for plagiarism. It gives a student the option to now know where the words are from. It's a revision tool — not a 'got you' punishing tool."
Students still worry about keeping ownership of their work, Shelton said.
"They don't own your essay, but you agree to let them put your phrases and words in the database," he said. "Your contribution goes into the pool but never your individual identity. They can't make that claim at all."
Students give Turnitin.com permission to save their paper in one of the site's databases, but the student's name is not attached to the paper once it's been saved on the site.
John Barrie, president, CEO and creator of Turnitin.com, said there's no other way to check the validity of students' work.
"Honor codes don't work, harsh penalties don't work and changing assignments doesn't work," Barrie said. "Other than sitting next to them while they write, there's no other way to check their work."
Shelton said while the copying wasn't an "epidemic," he did have a few cases of "the best, well-meaning, cheerful" students accidentally plagiarizing their work.
"The question is not are you trying to cheat, but how can you give yourself credit for having found these other sources," he said. "How can you add your voice to the chorus of scholars? That's fundamentally an act of maturity."
Barrie said three databases check commercial content with newspapers, academic journals and other student papers to cross-reference material.
Barrie added that if there was another way to stop this "massive, massive problem," Turnitin.com wouldn't be as successful.
"A lot of people will say the only person who gets hurt when somebody cheats is the person who cheated," he said. "The person who gets hurt the most is the one who goes for the honest grade."
