Turnitin – Plagiarism and Online Marking

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a web-based service used primarily to check assignments to gauge the possibility that some of the work submitted has been plagiarized. It does this by comparing the text of the assignment to:

The web
Its own database of assignments
Online journals and other publications.

Turnitin will produce an Originality Report, specifically indicating where it found precise examples of text that are part of the assignment script also appearing online.

Examples of What to Use Turnitin For

Helping identity plagiarism
Allowing on to add electronic comments to assignments, submitted in electronic form
Providing audio comments/feedback on assignments
More here.

How Do I Get It?

Get a College account set up. Email martin.peoples@nwrc.ac.uk . Your account will be your email address.

Go to www.turnitinuk.com

You can also use Turinitin by downloading the app onto an iPad. This is especially useful for adding electronic comments to assignments. Using your finger, just drag the relevant comment to the appropriate place in assignment.

Who’s Uses Turnitin?

Luke Mc Closkey (Sport) – I use Turnitin for marking all my assignments. The iPad app makes it very easy to electronically add comments to each script. Turnitin has meant that I no longer need to carry home a bundle of papers to mark. I highly recommend Turnitin.

Annemarie Hunter (Health & Social Care) – I use Turnitin with my students for 2 particular reasons:

To ensure the work I am marking is the students work – and where they have used references/quotes they have given recognition to the author/s; and
Many of my students progress to University and it allows me to develop their academic skills. I allow them to see exactly what TurnitinUk shows – at university this does not happen. This is in hope that they realise the importance of reading literature, understanding it and then using it without copying and pasting in demonstrating their knowledge on the subject matter.

Tina Duffy (Health & Social Care) – I have used Turnitin for almost all coursework on the L3 and HE programmes I teach on. I have a test page which is open until the end of the semester for students to try out uploading and to assess their similarity score prior to submission dates. Also:

I have rubrics created for all assignments and have devised a range of general comments applicable to the subject areas and assessment for convenience
I occasionally use the PC but have been using the iPad primarily for marking as I can mark off line and have even marked work in the car waiting for my daughter
I annotate using the comments tool and prescribed terms, I also provide an overall comment on student performance and areas for development in text format, I haven’t ventured to using the audio feedback yet.
I have saved marked work/reports and forwarded them to Internal verifiers, it will be interesting to see what the external verifier have to say about this, as they generally like working with paper.
On the course I co-ordinate student engagement is high, but the fact that we are using Turnitn in a standardised way in the course team has supported this.
Plagarism has reduced a lot, there is still some, but I can see on submission dates what the scores are and usually contact the student to ask them to work on the piece further to bring their scores down.
It is also a really useful way of quickly seeing who is understanding and who isn’t, as we have a student who had a similarity score of 89% for a very scientific unit and it was clear that he really didn’t understand the content as he had cut and paste the majority of the work.
-Turnitin has also helped us detect incidents of plagiarism where students were copying from each other
-It is also a useful way of sending out mass emails if you don’t have access to a distribution list for classes
It takes some time initially to set up rubrics etc.. but it is definitely a very convenient and accessible tool.

Grainne McNamara (Music) – In the Music department, Turnitin was piloted in the previous academic year by Ronan and Rory. Due to the positive feedback from staff and students alike we took the decision to switch entirely to online submission via Turnitin for the HND Music Production course. We have found a big improvement in timely submission of work by students. It has greatly improved efficiency in marking and feedback. The instances of plagiarism are a now practically nil. The external examiner saw no issues with our use of Turnitin for feedback to students as we can use the comment section to write extension feedback.

Help on Turnitin on Moodle (search for Plagiarism Turnitin)

Keywords: tools; plagiarism; citation_skills; referencing