Quantifying academic integrity: Turnitin and negotiated ethics in higher education in Turkey

Abstract

The similarity/plagiarism detection software Turnitin's 'similarity score' has come to constitute a singularly reliable measure of academic integrity. By focusing on the case of Turkey, I describe how this quantification is facilitated by the spread and normalization of platformization in higher education, itself a component of the increasingly neoliberal academic field. I argue that such quantification both posits academic integrity as a technicality to manage and simultaneously engenders novel ethical negotiations. Quantification and its related skillsets modify one's relations to their writing(-self) by severing the bond between originality and integrity. At the same time, academic integrity acquires new (and negotiated) content through practices around the use of Turnitin. I trace these negotiations in interlocutor discourses on Turnitin hacks, literature reviews and academic fraud. My approach is informed by the 'ethical turn' in anthropology of the 2010s.