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This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.
If the California College in the Community wants his faculty to be able to detect plagiarism and writing AI in student documents, he can buy software from a company called Turnitin at a discount price. Uniting together through Community College League of California, each campus receives the purchasing power of the team. Although the league has more than four times more colleges than the California State University system, its members pay more to a student for Turnitin software.
And the state system CAL pays more than the University of California in Berkli.
And UC Berkeley pays more than the City University in New York.
As part of Investigation of the consequences of using this software in higher educationCalletatters and the mark collected the purchase records from approximately 60 California institutions, as well as the CUNY system through public records requests. This investigation chronicle the dominance of Turnitin, which continues to collect millions of dollars every year from California colleges and universities, despite its inexperienced technology and the search for an eternal student’s work license that scans.
When reviewing records in California, CalMatters and the mark, they also found broad differences in the quantity of Turnitin, accrued for their instruments to prevent plagiarism, even when colleges licensed the same product. While Turnitin did not respond to interview requests, seeking information about his pricing strategy, experts said that companies charge different amounts to different institutions based on how much they expect the institutions to be willing to pay.
In 2020, Michel Davidf retired as chief infrastructure employee at the office of California State University, where he helped centralize technology purchases to provide huge discounts. When presented with the results of the Calfatters-Markup investigation for Turnitin pricing, Davidoff was not surprised. He said the size and reputation of an institution routinely swing the price of a product.
“When Berkli wants to negotiate his pricing,” said Davidf, “Everyone wants Berkley’s logo on the website, knowing he bought it.”
Small colleges with a little name recognition, then they receive the bigger deals. “They don’t have a lot of money, they don’t have (many) students and they pay the most,” he said.
The most extreme example of this variation came in records showing how many campuses they paid during the school year 2021-22. Turnitin was flooded with customers in the previous year, when the Covid pandemic turned off campuses and the instructors worried that they could not trust students at home. In the same year, UC Berkeley paid $ 2.11 per student for his Turnitin license. Cal State Long Beach and Antelope Valley College have paid $ 3.03 per student for the same product, records show. And the UC Irvine continued education department paid more than a double, $ 6.50 per student.
Still, on the other side of the country, Cuny’s purchase records show that the 200,000 students’ system has received the best deal from everyone, paying only $ 1.79 per student for the same technology.
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Davidf, for his part, was ill to hear that Kuni got a better deal from the Cal State system.
"Cuny? I'm broken," he said with a laugh.
Colleagues tend to make a "request for suggestions" when they want to make institutional purchases. The companies then submit offers outlining the products they have, their capabilities and the price. The Cal State system does not allow companies to charge much less than it costs to provide a product, but otherwise encourages companies to give it the best deal they can.
The latest system signed a contract with Turnitin in March 2024, locking in the main plagiarism detector of the company for $ 2.59 per student last year and $ 2.71 per student this year. For colleges to add AI upgrade, Turnitin first offered the institutions a total price of $ 3.05 and $ 3.19 per student respectively. Only six campuses took them for the upgrade offer. But the negotiations continued.
Leslie Kennedy, Assistant Deputy Cantzler in Academic Technology Services for the Cabinet Cabinet Cabinet, reached for his contact at Turnitin, saying that there was a search for detectors in the mud country, but that campuses could not cope with costs.
"Turnitin came back to me and said," We can give you better prices if you buy for the whole system, "Kennedy said. The company may have lost potential profits in discounts on the AI detector for individual campuses, but it guarantees more business. When Turnitin offered an additional 13% discount on the top of the Cal State deal already, Kennedy agreed to pay about $ 100,200 from his budget in the office to make it happen. And now another 16 campuses have access to the AI detector at a discount price of $ 3.12 per student instead of $ 3.19.
Meanwhile, South Orange County's Community College area pays $ 3.57 per student for the same product this year.
As the cost of teaching the TURNITIN teaching sounds a little, the price increases. The Cal State system has been collectively spent over $ 6 million on this technology to prevent plagiarism over the last seven years. And UC Berkeley is in the middle of 10 years, $ 1.2 million in its own.
Calletters College Dellah Brumer and Jeremy Garza journalism networks have helped to collect recording for buying this story.
The Kapor Foundation supported this project through its scientific scholarship program.
This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.