Cheating Goes Hi-Tech

My son's school has a policy against plagiarism and uses turnitin.com for big projects but never asks for citations on smaller projects or homework nor do teachers ever cite where they have taken the resources they hand out right and left in class. No teacher has ever reviewed with him what plagiarism really means besides "not copying" and several students at his school were punished for plagarism until it turned out that teachers weren't really looking at what the reports generated by turnitin.com had dinged them for - like forgetting to close a quote, or having quoted from the same site as other students who wrote papers on the same subject and quoted directly from the same sites. An interesting problem that no teacher ever explained about turnitin.com. When he went to apply to Union College this past fall for college he was asked to turn in papers that had teachers comments on them, but he had none because none of his papers have ever been returned to him for more than a quick 5 minute look to see his grade, all in the name of preventing digital cheating. So how do you talk to kids about digital cheating? i am not sure when schools are always thinking the worst, not supporting the growth of writing by not handing back papers for corrections, not discussing plagiarism and not enforcing their plagiarism policy for every assignment nor modeling anti-plagiarism behavior with one policy for teachers and another for students. Schools are going to make or break intellectual property rights in this country and they need to start being consistent in their discussion, practice and policy.