Turnitin – the “anti-plagiarism” / “academic integrity” software available over the web

A description of the working of the software, and how it works with LUVLE, by the Learning Technology Group

Overview of Turnitin:

What does Turnitin do?

Turnitin is an internet search engine available over the web like Google, but instead of typing in a word or phrase, you send a whole essay or a whole set of essays to it, and instead of listing web sites that match the text, it produces a whole report for each essay, highlighting any text that matches content on the internet, and saying where it found it.

Turnitin UK is available at:

http://www.submit.ac.uk

Detect plagiarism.

It finds matches with material on the internet, and creates reports of what it finds.

- It is an academic decision by subject specialists whether or not the work is an instance of plagiarism. Turnitin is a tool that can help find and collate evidence for that decision.

What Turnitin doesn’t do:

Uses of Turnitin at Lancaster Uni

After consultation with departments around the University, LTG identified 3 uses for Turnitin, and have documented all 3 for use at the University.

1. Single upload of a shoddy or suspicious essay to create a report to produce evidence for poor referencing or possible plagiarism.2. Bulk upload of all essays from courses to act as a deterrent against plagiarism.3. Student upload of their own essays, with provision for them to see their own work and re-submit, as part of an endeavour to help students write good essays.

One that we didn’t use:

Many sites allow students to register with a course on Turnitin themselves, and then upload work for checking. We didn’t use this because:

• There’s no connection with University systems to check that a student has done this (as there is with our LUVLE virtual learning environment), and

• Every student would have to taught yet another on-line facility they have to use. If staff do bulk uploads, at least only a few have to learn, and only learn once

1. The Single Upload

Usually used to collate evidence for plagiarism, or to create a report to go through with a student re. Poor referencing. Often used where no bulk scanning is done, but an electronic version of work is required.

If the marking of the paper copy arises suspicions/worries that something is really not right, Turnitin can be used to create a report finding evidence of problems so that the matter can be taken further.

Can be a real time saver!

2. The Bulk Upload, Deterrent Approach:

Work that has been handed in electronically via LUVLE is automatically packaged up in one file, called a zip file, and saved to your PC.

From there, it can be uploaded to Turnitin, and Turnitin will go away and create all the reports for each essay.

The list of essay results give a percentage of essay that matches something on the internet – the percentages are then scanned, and those essays that score highly can then be checked further.

3. Student Self-Submission and Checking

Staff set up the course area in Turnitin to allow students to self-register, submit work, and then re-submit until their essay has no plagiarised or poorly referenced parts to it. This enables students to teach themselves, with close supervision how to write proper essays.

Note that this requires a considerable amount of supervision. If this is missing, the students may just become confused about what they are trying to do, or they may use this as an opportunity to perfect their plagiarism techniques!

Enhancing Academic Integrity:

Whichever way Turnitin is used, we hope that it is with supporting information, so that it can be described as a tool for enhancing academic integrity.

Although there does need to be the possibility of getting caught out in the background to discourage cheats, universities are really all about nurturing talent, not scaring people into compliance.

In consultation with academics in departments, our documentation and our overall goals are therefore about using Turnitin to improve the standard of work.

Enhancing Academic Integrity:

Next three slides are sources of information for helping the students write better (Back to Turnitin in a minute). Here are links about good essay writing:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/celt/sldc/courses/EL_intro_08.html

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/celt/sldc/materials/plagiarism.html

Spoke to a colleague about this, and she said that an especially effective way of showing what constitutes a good essay is by going through a previous real essay (with student’s permission), and showing the students how you marked it high, and why.

Enhancing Academic Integrity:

Aside from the information on how to write good essays, here are the two methods:

1). Set students relatively simple essay tasks in the first term of their first year that will test them on essay writing abilities, eg:

• Correct referencing • Correct proportion of essay verses references• Answering the question• No plagiarised material in essay

Focus on those who have problems; thereafter check on progress by checking essays as before.

Enhancing Academic Integrity:

(2). After showing the students what constitutes a good essay, let the students submit (and re-submit) essays to Turnitin themselves - our 3rd method of Turnitin use. ITMOC in the Management School pioneered this. The instructions to show staff and students how this works are here:

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/celt/celtweb/essay_assist_students

This enables students to identify mistakes in referencing themselves, but it is vital to get across to students why, given that they have the means to cheat more effectively that they are still foolish to try.

Use of Turnitin and LUVLE

To start using Turnitin, staff members should contact: learningtechnology@lancaster.ac.uk

I will create you an instructors area on the Turnitin website, which you’ll login to using your email address plus a password, which Turnitin support give you. You can then create a class area for each course you teach, and within each one, assignments.

How to do this is shown at this web address:http://www.lancs.ac.uk/celt/celtweb/anti_plagiarismThis shows how to do it whether you intend to submit work yourself or get the students to do it.

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

The most common use of Turnitin is the bulk staff upload option, where students submit their work to LUVLE, staff download it, and submit it to Turnitin.

After the students have submitted their work, you can view it in the coursework area:

To download all the submissions, above this list is a button to create the single ‘zip’ file:

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Above the download button are the settings for the download – here are the default settings.

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Now login to Turnitin and you’ll see your list of classes. Click on the one for this assignment, and then on the list of assignments in the class area you’ve made to receive the work –

Now, click on the ‘Submit paper’ icon:

A dialogue box appears, and the first drop down says ‘submit a paper by file upload’. If you had a single file to upload, you’d fill in the fields as shown, but for use with LUVLE zip files, set it to ‘zip file’ and the dialogue will change so that you can upload your file

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

If you had a single file to check – from LUVLE, from your hard drive, or from another VLE, this is what the single upload box looks like:

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Browse for the ‘zip’ file that you got from LUVLE, and then click on submit.

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Turnitin confirms that it can unpack the files. Note that LUVLE has added the names of the students and their usernames and their library card numbers (dummy codes here) to the file names so that you can identify individuals. After one more confirmation, the files are submitted to Turnitin

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Initially greyed out, the report bars to the right of the names will turn into links to the report in about 5 minutes to half an hour, depending upon the number of files, their size, and how busy Turnitin is:

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

The coloured percentage bars are the links to the reports. Note that unfortunately, at time of writing, the percentages still contain the percentage before properly quoted text is excluded. This feature really slows down assessment of student scripts.

Excerpt from report with default settings of quoted and bibliography still included(!) You can see here that the passage in green has been flagged as a match, although it is properly quoted, along with the passage in red, which is not correctly quoted:

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Same report once the quoted + bibliography have been excluded. Note that the match percentage is now at the correct amount of 22%, and the green section is no longer green, as it hasn’t been flagged, but the red one still is.

Using Turnitin and LUVLE – quick demo:

Interpreting results:

Possibly copied:

Look for no attempt to attribute text that matched internet content, in an essay in which some work has been properly referenced.

Just poorly written:

Student writing style that makes references to sources without referencing them formally.

To register for Turnitin, contact: learningtechnology@lancaster.ac.uk and we’ll set you up an account for your e-mail address.

If you’d like to use Turnitin with LUVLE, you’ll need to turn on course submissions within your existing modules, or again contact learningtechnology@lancaster.ac.uk if you need a module to be set up for your course.

Documentation for the service is at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/celt/celtweb/anti_plagiarism

Signing up for Turnitin: