In the US, it’s more complicated than that, especially for online stuff. The AAUP is a good resource.
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Do you happen to know if that decade-old statement still holds?
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It “holds” in the way that anything from the AAUP holds. It’s not law, or even a rule. It’s what they says “should be” and what universities are usually held to as “you should be doing this.”
In the US, generally public universities will say “technically we own copyright, because you created it as ‘work for hire,’ but we don’t enforce that. So it’s yours.” And many universities will make an explicit statement, in a Faculty Handbook, policy, or CBA.
Brown University has a statement that nicely outlines how many (most?) handle it:
The copyright in materials created by an employee within the scope of employment are owned by the employer under the “work made for hire” doctrine unless otherwise specified. In adherence with long-standing tradition relating to course materials (and scholarly publications), the University considers most course materials created by its faculty exempt from the “work made for hire” doctrine subject to a reservation of specific rights to the University as well as certain restrictions on use.
Ownership of copyright for all of the below belong to the faculty-creator unless the material in question was a) developed with significant input from others at Brown b) derived significantly from use of University resources, or c) the faculty-creator received special or additional compensation to create the course beyond his or her regular salaried appointment. Examples of course materials owned by the faculty creator include:
(List went here)
And then lists exclusions.
Where faculty get into trouble is if, as was common a decade ago, the university pays us to put one of our courses online. When lots of courses were going online in the early/mid aughts, many universities gave us a stipend to put courses into an online format and teach it. My uni paid $5k per course. It was great. But it also meant that I didn’t own it.
https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/provost/policies/faqs
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Wouldn’t this imply that professors submitting students’ work to anti-cheating detection services, would be blatant copyright infringement on students?
There have been some, maybe not enough, court decisions on whether the “work for hire” provisions of various copyright acts apply to faculty. From one interesting law review article:
Few reported cases exist addressing the issue of whether
the educational institution or the faculty member owns the
copyright to teaching materials prepared by a faculty member.
All the reported cases that do exist have either held, or stated
in dictum, that the copyright to the materials at issue in those
cases belonged to the faculty member, at least in the absence of
an explicit agreement to the contrary between the institution
and the faculty member. Thus, cases have essentially followed
the “teacher exception” to the work for hire rule.
In recent years there have been efforts on the part of some legislatures (mainly GOP-led) to force faculty to open up all their materials to inspection. There have been some decisions around these as well, for example this one in Missouri where an appeals court upheld that faculty held copyright over their syllabi and so could not be compelled to post them online. (Discussed further here.)
Overall, the protections depend on a combination of federal copyright law and state common law.
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So far the courts have said it is not, though more cases might come:
I think the issue is that Turnitin is basically reading papers, not publishing them, so copyright law does not apply. (If copyright protected against non-holders reading the material, or using the material contained therein, that would be bizarre.)
There might of course be other issues with the service, for example if it reveals personal information about the authors of the papers.
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That would depend on the terms of his employment contract. The copyright act of 1976 updated work for hire rules, so it would not be automated case here.
Edit: I was thinking of how it applied to independent contractors, which isn’t relevant here. I think it would largely be an issue of employment/agency law in the relevant jurisdictions, as the relevant statutes regarding work for hire don’t precisely define things like “scope of employment.”
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Yep.
It can be a way to evaluate minimal competency in a subject area. (Pass/Fail). Or show attainment of higher levels of mastery (grades that go from F to A for example.) If I’m about to be operated on, I really don’t care how Dr. Jones did compared to other people in that school year, I want to know that they mastered the topic and know what they’re doing.
This is where that old fallacy that “teaching to the test is bad” is disproved. Are you testing them on the stuff they need to know and be able to do? That’s a good test. Are you teaching them the stuff they need to know and be able to do? That’s a good course that should result in generally positive test outcomes for students who do the work. 
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Per the linked article, the judge found this to be fair use. To clarify, fair use doesn’t mean “copyright law does not apply.” The fact that they are not publishing the papers would be beneficial to Turnitin’s fair use claim, but not publishing something doesn’t automatically protect one from copyright infringement. Copyright is actually a bundle of rights, most fundamental being the right to make copies (regardless of whether they are to be published. Courts generally allow private citizens or organizations to make an archive copy of copyrighted material they own, but generally, any creation of a copy is technically infringement). Other rights included in that bundle are translation rights, adaptation rights, the right to make derivative works, etc.
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For a lot of things like this, related to faculty, both faculty and universities have been reluctant to test things in court. “Academic freedom” is one of those. Generally circuit courts have held that individual faculty don’t have academic freedom—that it resides with institutions. Faculty usually win cases that clearly relate to First Amendment rights, but as the AAUP states:
The Supreme Court, however, has not clearly defined the scope of academic freedom protections under the First Amendment, and commentators disagree about the scope of those protections.
And
Although the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently recognized that academic freedom is a First Amendment right, the scope of the First Amendment right of academic freedom for professors remains unclear.
And, of course, this is true at public institutions. For private colleges the rules are very different. I remember being at the American Historical Association’s interviewing cattle call in the mid-1990s and a guy came flying out of one of the interview table areas yelling, loudly, about how “they asked me my religion! They’re violating my rights! They asked me about my religious beliefs! I want them reported!” A few of us tried to talk him down, “Dude, it’s a private Methodist college. It’s in their job advert” but he didn’t let up.
Now I feel extra bad for not having a worthwhile Son of Sam joke.
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And anyone who reads academic trade journals (like the Chronicle of Higher Education) knows it is being hard-tested all the time. I’m fortunate to be in a union shop, and we have explicit language on both academic freedom and on instructional IP.
Ask your dog, maybe he has one.
In the most recent courses I took, I was required to give explicit permission to use my work for that purpose for each assignment I submitted.
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When I was in university, you couldn’t use a decent calculator because “in the future, you’re not always going to have a fancy calculator in your pocket all the time”.
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I’m not sure 100% what you are suggesting, but there are a lot of ways that teachers use to set their scores. Ultimately if you are adjusting the scores to match some desired statistical property that falls under what many people would call grading on a curve. It doesn’t mean only “fit to a bell distribution” which in my experience is very uncommon in the modern day outside of standardized tests.
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What I’m talking about are grading tools that re-scale the test to the performance of the students in that class. Where it varies from grading on a curve is that it resets the whole test based on the top performers, but everyone in the class could still get As.
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Yes, and no. One thing that was stark for me, moving between the two, was that in non-union shops it was easier to “give grace” for things. So, a woman in my department got pregnant, and we worked amongst ourselves to take some classes on for her so she could have the whole semester off with pay. We’d done that for a few different folks, men and women, and it was always possible because of the informality of it. Harder to do if it’s union.
This has never been a problem for us. It is the kind of thing administrators on non-union campuses say to discourage unionization.
I was the chair of our faculty senate (and cochair of the system senate) in the period following the 2008 economic collapse, and regularly spoke to my counterparts on campuses across the country. The worst administrative assaults on faculty rights were on non-unionized campuses, and one of the most successful ways to fend off such attacks is a credible threat of becoming unionized.
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I do statistical analysis on my tests to ensure that the questions make sense and are at a reasonable level that reflects what I taught. Most of my questions have been tweaked for years. If I have to write new test questions, all of that work gets lost and I start again from zero with no assurance that my test is valid.
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If you grade on a curve, then your aim is to differentiate those students who are the very tip top of the class from those who are merely excellent and so on down the curve. If you aim is to differentiate levels of mastery and don’t care who’s the very best and the very worst, then you grade on a scale. I have no idea why the curve is popular. Perhaps it as jtiii said here, that “the curve hides the fact that the teacher is doing a shitty job.”
Students are generally outraged by the curve because the curve dictates that only a small number of students will earn an A, even if every student mastered the material, while the rest of the institution is graded on a 4 point scale to generate a grade point average. If you have one professor who grades on a curve, it can throw your GPA into the crapper because under the bell curve, most of the students MUST get a C.
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