Turnitin: what is it good for? John Parkinson (CAPE) Centre for Academic Practice Enhancement, Middlesex University

Aims Explain Turnitin in the context of Plagiarism and Academic Integrity Explore how Turnitin can be used by Educators and Students Provide guidance on how Turnitin can be utilised by educators to help students improve their academic writing skills and to avoid unintended plagiarism In this short presentation I hope to accomplish the following:

What does Turnitin do? Turnitin does NOT detect Plagiarism Turnitin highlights ANY content in a student submission that matches material from a range of sources at it’s disposal and presents this in a detailed report This report can be used to identify material within a student’s work that MAY require attention if plagiarism is to be avoided.

The Turnitin system lives on a dedicated website and is not owned by Middlesex University MDX educators with Teacher access to modules within the Unihub My Learning environment can create Turnitin assignments for their students using a Turnitin ‘plug in’ available within the module activities toolset This plug in allows educators to create Turnitin assignments on the Turnitin website and automatically creates a link to these assignments within the My Learning module itself. Where is Turnitin?

Turnitin Repository and reach Approximately 45 Billion webpages 110 million content items from publishers 400 million student papers submitted to other Turnitin assignments Chris Harrick, Turnitin vice president of Marketing, 2014

The Turnitin Lifecycle

Let’s take a look at a Turnitin Similarity report … The Similarity Report

It is important to emphasise that: The total similarity percentage is not the whole story - underlying matches are key Matches are not plagiarism if appropriately acknowledged Turnitin can only find matches with content available to it – many key texts may not be available to the system Not all Turnitin assignments are setup to add the student submissions to the Turnitin database The Similarity Report

Uses and Abuses of Turnitin It is important to have a clear understanding of the use of Turnitin as a punitive OR supportive and developmental tool. Punitive – educators can run student submissions through Turnitin without the students knowledge or consent – is this appropriate in modern educational establishments? Supportive and developmental – offer students Turnitin as a tool that can help them work more effectively with research content and cite this content correctly.

Some final thoughts Anyone can pay for a Turnitin account and run work through this without adding this to the Turnitin repository Some people who make a living writing academic work for students love Turnitin: beat-turnitin-com/ beat-turnitin-com/ Here’s one of several studies outlining the benefits of using Turnitin alongside guidance on how it can be used most effectively: php/rlt/article/view/17218/html php/rlt/article/view/17218/html