Using Turnitin - Guidance notes for Staff
What are the Limitations of Turnitin?
General Recommendations for Use
Using Turnitin as a Teaching and Learning Aid
Set up and Administrative Procedures
Training for Staff and Students
Which Journals Does Turnitin Search?
Examples of use in the University of Sheffield
What is Turnitin?
What are the Limitations of Turnitin?
- Turnitin can only check a document against electronic sources. It cannot check for text matching from books. It also has limited coverage of password protected or subscription sites.
- Turnitin is good at picking up possible “cut and paste from electronic sources” plagiarism and “student to student” plagiarism (whether at the University of Sheffield or at other institutions) but is of limited use in detecting other types of unfair means e.g. commissioned work from cheat sites.
- Turnitin can be easily “fooled” by minor rephrasing which often does not equate to good writing.
- Turnitin is only useful for certain types of assignment i.e. essays, dissertations, reports.
- Although it is possible to submit assignments in some foreign languages the database is much more limited than the English language database.
- There can be delays (up to 24 hours) in producing the originality report, particularly at busy times.
General Recommendations for Use
- There is no obligation for departments to use Turnitin. However, where they chose to do so, it is recommended that departments have a clear policy on its use, ideally integrated into their policy on plagiarism/unfair means. Adopting a clear and consistent approach within a department is essential for helping students understand how Turnitin is being used with their work.
- Students should be informed of how the department uses Turnitin. It is recommended that where Turnitin is used with whole cohorts of students, an early formative exercise is provided in which students submit a piece of work to Turnitin and then discuss the originality report with a tutor. This should help to demystify the software and make the whole process more transparent in a similar way to looking at marking criteria with students before a first assignment. It can also help with understanding about plagiarism (see Using Turnitin as a teaching and learning aid).
- For the purposes of data protection, students should be asked to sign to indicate consent for their work to be submitted to the software and to be retained for the length of the service. Students’ work is retained solely for the purpose of comparison with other work submitted and is not made available to other institutions.
- Departments should ensure that there are procedures in place for the electronic submission of assessed work. Non-compliance with a request for electronic submission of an assignment or an assignment accompanied by a Turnitin originality report should be treated as if the work has not been submitted in line with the General Regulations as to examinations (Regulation 9).
Using Turnitin for Detection
- Departments need to consider whether to screen all appropriate assignments or just those where they have cause for concern. Screening all appropriate assignments can act as a useful deterrent for students against plagiarism.
- Turnitin can save time in identifying sources in suspected cases of plagiarism and provides evidence where a case is identified. It also provides a clear and consistent way to deal with suspected cases
- Academic judgement should always be used to make the final decision on whether plagiarism has occurred.
Using Turnitin as a Teaching and Learning Aid
When integrated into teaching about academic writing and plagiarism, Turnitin can provide an effective tool to help students learn about the use of sources in academic writing.
- Students can be given an early formative assignment task to submit to Turnitin. The resulting originality report can then form the basis of tutorial discussion about the use of sources and how students could improve in this area. This assumes that students have already had a certain amount of instruction about the use of sources in academic writing. Suggested approach from Leeds University.
- Students can be given access to the software prior to final submission to allow them to submit their work and make adjustments. This can help students to identify any unintentional plagiarism before final submission. An assignment may well not improve substantially in overall quality as a result but allowing students this facility will at least signal that their assignment may well not be acceptable in its existing form. Where this approach is adopted it is essential that students are given sufficient training in understanding the originality reports. Some departments allow unlimited access to the software before final submission, others restrict it to one or two submissions while others allow one submission before final submission in Level 1 only.
- Originality reports can help staff to target students who need support with use of sources in academic writing.
Using the Originality Reports
Submitting an assignment to Turnitin results in an originality report which highlights any text found to be matching. As well as links to the original sources where matched text was identified, it produces a figure for the percentage of "non original material".
Care needs to be taken when interpreting these reports.
- The report may flag up correctly cited quotations.
- Students sometimes find the reports worrying or confusing if they have not had sufficient training in understanding them.
- An acceptable amount of matching text will vary from discipline to discipline and by type of assignment. Some departments specify an acceptable amount of matching text (generally around <25%). Many departments prefer to use the figure only as a rough guide to flag up potential plagiarism. For large cohorts, some departments find it useful to check the highest scoring reports and then sample ones with lower percentages of matching text.
- The reports can be used in tutorials about academic writing. See Using Turnitin as a Teaching and learning aid.
Accessing the Service
- The Turnitin software is accessed via individual MOLE modules. Turnitin assignments are created by Course Instructors which gives students direct access to Turnitin. Guides for how to do this are available from the MOLE helpdesk at: mole@sheffield.ac.uk
Set up and Administrative Procedures
- Tutor and student guides are available covering the technical side of setting up a class with Turnitin.
- Turnitin needs to be re-set up every year and can be quite time-consuming. Some departments have found it useful to assign this job to one person to help with consistency.
- Departments need to consider arrangements for preserving anonymity for marking purposes. Some departments ask a clerical/administrative member of staff to remove the cover pages of assignments before passing them on to academic staff for marking. An alternative is to mark an anonymous hard copy version, (which students submit at the same time as the electronic version). Provision for checking that the two versions are identical needs to be in place.
Training for Staff and Students
It is recommended that all staff involved with using the software are provided with training. Contact mole@sheffield.ac.uk As described above, if students are to submit work themselves and receive the originality report, they need to understand how this works. Ideally, this should be incorporated into study skills/academic writing sessions.
Which Journals does Turnitin Search?
Turnitin subscribes to several databases including GALE InfoTrac, One File (which includes almost everything they had in ProQuest, plus about 30 million more documents), Emerald Publishing Data, and the Gutenburg Collection of Literary Works. For further information on the Gale InfoTrac, OneFile database a list of titles and holdings can be found at http://www.gale.com/onefile/. The JSTOR webpage at www.jstor.org is currently in the database with 4412 pages of content (non-subscription pages). Turnitin does not cover the two main legal databases Westlaw and Lexis Nexis.
Other Software
- For detection only
Google and Google Scholar can be used to identify electronic sources. - For collusion
CopycatchGold - collusion detection software which searches for similarities between texts but does not search the internet
http://www.cebe.heacademy.ac.uk/learning/Plagiarism/index.php - For computer code
MOSS which stands for "Measure Of Software Similarity" produced originally at Berkeley Uni. USA and currently hosted at Stanford Uni. USA. This allows one to package up a bunch of, for example, 'C' programs and send them electronically and receive back a detailed on-line viewable report of degree of similarity of the various submissions highlighting similar code by colour marking of the original 'C' scripts. It apparently works for all sorts of other programming languages too. It is found to be useful in highlighting similarity in order to pin-point instances where unfair means might have been employed for further examination and interpretation by a human.
The service is free; people wishing to use it must simply register and obtain the required scripts. A downside is that one has to run a Perl script to send material to the service. This can be done by running the supplied Perl script from a departmental Unix machine.
For more info. see: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ - For other source code similarity detection tools http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/assessment/plagiarism/detectiontools_sourcecode.html
Examples of Use in the University of Sheffield
ScHARR view Turnitin as a useful tool amongst a range of tools to help students learn about academic writing, in particular the use of sources. As part of the work students do in this area, they produce a short practice essay which they submit to Turnitin. They can then amend and resubmit the essay as many times as they like (until the deadline) until they have reduced the percentage of matching text to <24%. In all subsequent appropriate assignments students follow a similar procedure. ScHARR believe this has had a significant effect on reducing the numbers of plagiarism cases. By familiarising students with the software, they come to have a better understanding of how an academic will check their work, using the report as well as, and often to a greater extent, their own academic judgement. The approach also helps students to avoid any unintentional plagiarism. Further details of ScHARR´s approach to plagiarism.
Electronic and Electrical Engineering views Turnitin as a support tool for the department´s referencing policy and has a coordinated departmental policy used with all levels of students.
- Students are informed in the student handbook which assignments will be submitted to Turnitin and are responsible for submitting their own work via submit.ac.uk
- Turnitin is used for some formative and some summative assessments. It is used formatively with lab reports and early year project work – the originality reports are discussed in study skills tutorials, focussing on the technical content or style of the report. In later years, it is used with summative assessments, purely to deter and detect plagiarism.
- Originality reports are scanned by the departmental plagiarism officer who identifies any cases that need further investigation and calls a meeting with the Head of Teaching and Year Tutor. No fixed percentage of matching text is used; individual cases are considered on their merits. For summative assessments students do not see the report nor receive any feedback on it (although study skills support is offered to students where the reports seem to indicate they would benefit from it).
Geography
Departmental guide on implementing Turnitin
Research into plagiarism detection software
Paul Clough (Information Studies) and a colleague from Computer Science are building a resource to evaluate different plagiarism detection tools (and determine their "limits" of detection). They are planning to create a corpus of examples (simulated and real). If anyone has ideas on how to generate this kind of resource (or could provide some student resource to generate examples) then please contact Paul.
Additional Resources
Using Turnitin with Medium-sized cohorts: A case study: University of Bedfordshire
Reinforcing Reference Skills with Turnitin: a case study, University of Bedfordshire
University of Sheffield Survey of Use of Turnitin Report, November 2008