Anti-Plagiarism Tool Banned

This is silly. According to Canada's ChronicleHerald (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Mount Saint Vincent University has banned Turnitin.com, the popular plagiarism-detection software. From the article "University expels cheater scan" by Rick Conrad:

Turnitin.com is an Internet-based subscription service that professors and others use to root out whether students' papers contain material copped from other sources without giving proper credit. It maintains a database of millions of essays and compares submitted papers not only against those but also against websites and other published works. It's recognized as a leader in helping keep students, academics, and sometimes journalists, honest. But many student groups believe that using a service like Turnitin is too punitive and automatically presumes guilt. Studies have shown that about 15 per cent of university students cheat regularly. "Everyone has the right to learn in an environment that is free of guilt presumption and fear, and Turnitin.com does exactly what it shouldn't be doing in a higher educational environment," Ms. Brushett said. "It creates a culture of fear, it creates a culture of guilt and to me, that hinders some people from pursuing higher education and doing it with an open mind." "We feel that Turnitin.com is a back-end approach. We need to promote academic integrity, we need to teach students what is plagiarism, what you should do, what you shouldn't do and have more personalized ways of checking for plagiarism.