Information about TurnItIn.com

Introduction

Students seem to have taken literally what Tom Lehrer urged in his skit about the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. (Although his advice can be found at numerous sites on the Web, directly quoting it here, ironically, would constitute plagiarism or at least violation of copyright.) The problem of plagiarism in written work by students has grown immensely in recent years because of the vast amount of information that is available in electronic form and easily “copied and pasted” into papers. (For a comprehensive listing of online literature about the problem, see the section on plagiarism in our document about literature and writing.)

The University of Memphis has secured a site license for faculty to use TurnItIn to maintain a high level of academic integrity in written work by students. It is not required that you use it, but the experience of instructors who have used it is generally good. While it can detect plagiarism and furnish strong evidence against those students who plagiarize, its chief value lies in the encouragement it gives students to avoid plagiarism because of the guarantee that their written work will be checked for unoriginality.

TurnItIn.com makes the claim that its program is “recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention” and that it “searches of billions of pages from both current and archived instances of the internet, millions of student papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals” and identifies any matches that it finds between those pages and work submitted by students. You will recognize an unstated weakness: TurnItIn searches a selected portion (though certainly very large) of online materials and does not search any materials, such as books, that are in print-only format. TurnItIn does not “grade” papers, as some students believe; it merely reports the matches it finds, and it is up to instructors to deal with the reports as they see fit.

Gaining access to TurnItIn

Before you can use TurnItIn, you must request access to it from the Advanced Learning Center at The University of Memphis. The Center has a page on academic integrity that contains information about using TurnItIn and a  PowerPoint presentation on TurnItIn.com that gives a brief introduction. After you complete a TurnItIn Checklist you may submit a Request for Access to TurnItIn (the Center asks that you allow two business days for a reply to your request).

Using TurnItIn

There are various training aids available to acquaint you with the program. The “Quick Start” guide for instructors will tell you how to set up your instructor profile, your classes, and your assignments in those classes. TurnItIn says the originality report is the heart of the program, and it has a video explaining how to use the originality report. These two may be enough to get you started well in using TurItIn. For complete information you will need to consult the Instructor’s Manual. (There are similar resources for students.)

TurnItIn is currently testing a “beta version” which has its own set of documentation. (Although the new version has the same underlying database as the current version, the user interface is quite different.) If you choose to switch to the beta version, you will need to look at that new documentation:

• Instructor quick start guide
• Instructor user manual
• Instructor video clips
  • Creating an instructor user profile
  • Setting up a class
  • Creating a student list
  • Submitting a paper
  • Viewing a report
• Plagiarism.org: The Learning Center (several resources on plagiarism, intended primarily for students but useful for faculty members as well)

You might also want to consult with experienced users of TurnItIn, who can give you valuable guidance both on the mechanics of the program and on the interpretation of the reports it generates.

WHen you log in to TurnItIn.com to set up classes and the assignments for those classes, you will have various options, such as whether to allow late submissions or re-submissions and whether to let students see the originality reports for their papers.

The class rolls on TurnItIn.com are entirely separate from your class rolls here at The University of Memphis. If you have several classes that have identical assignments, you could even create a single TurnItIn.com class for all of them. If the assignments are different or have different due dates, you should of course create separate classes to avoid confusion.

When you set up classes, you will assign each one a name and an enrollment password and TurnItIn.com will assign a unique course-identification number. You have the option of enrolling the students yourself, but you can save yourself a lot of work if you let students enroll themselves. To enable students to enroll themselves, you must give them the course-identification number and the enrollment password.

Here is a sample of the information you might give your students:

Shortly after a student submits an assignment, TurnItIn will conduct its search and make available a report on what it has found. Using that report, you will be able to see what passages, if any, in the paper match passages in documents in the database. The documents in which the matches were found will be identified, and you generally will be able to link to those documents to view them in full, if you wish to do so. (If the matches are in papers submitted to TurnItIn.com by other students, however, because of legal issues about privacy you may view those papers in full only if you first secure permission from the instructors of the students who submitted them.)

Copyright 2008 by The University of Memphis | Important Notice | Maintained by Maurice Crouse | Last modified 28 June 2008