DE Oracle @ UMUC

Using Turnitin as a Learning Tool - One Faculty Member's Experience

Diane Bartoo

Graduate School of Management and Technology

Published: March-April 2008

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Teaching-strategies

The UMUC license agreement with Turnitin.com, a Web-based service that helps prevent and detect possible plagiarism from Internet resources, allows students and faculty to submit papers to Turnitin for originality review. 

For the last few semesters, to help prevent plagiarism, I encouraged that students submit their papers to Turnitin and revise omissions or errors in citing before they submitted their papers to me for grading. In each of the courses, some students did use Turnitin but most didn't—probably because of time. Most students gave excuses that it took too long to figure out how to get into Turnitin and submit their papers.

This past semester, as part of the first week's homework assignment, I required that students complete the VAIL Tutorial (also to help with plagiarism), as I usually do, and also set up their Turnitin accounts (unless, per UMUC policy, they objected to submitting their written work to the Turnitin  database;  to date, no one has objected). This first week's homework assignment for early Turnitin setup seemed, at least for this class, to be quite beneficial: There was no last–minute frenzy trying to figure out how to get into the system and/or how to set up an account. In the end, I estimated that all but two students actually used Turnitin.  The two students who did not use Turnitin submitted their papers at the 11th hour, so I surmise that they ran out of time. 

In addition to requiring the early Turnitin setup, I encouraged students to submit their papers early on, including rough drafts, and to use Turnitin as an ongoing learning tool. I encouraged them to study the report, create missing citations, refine incomplete citations, and resubmit. I allowed students to submit their work to Turnitin as many times as they chose before sending their final submission to me.

As a result, some students clearly benefited from using Turnitin as a learning tool. They were surprised to see all the highlighting that an instructor might see on the generated Originality Report, so they were visually encouraged to look more closely at what they had written. Overall, citation and reference format accuracy was higher than any previous semester. Since the course I was teaching was a "first course," I consider the level of accuracy significant.

Using Turnitin as a learning tool would not meet the needs of faculty who prefer to use Turnitin primarily as a tool to assist in detecting plagiarism. For faculty who may wish to consider using Turnitin as a learning tool, my lessons learned are below.

• The Turnitin Originality Reports generated a lot of questions from the students, such as why a correctly cited passage was highlighted. From the questions I received, it was apparent that most students did not read the Student User Guide (accessed by clicking the "Help" button). To assist students with interpreting the Originality Report, I would emphasize the presence and location of the guide.
• I had to emphasize to students that the Turnitin report (the way I have been using it) is a learning tool for them (to help them be more aware of their potential citing and referencing issues) and that it draws attention to unoriginal text but is not a charge of plagiarism. Therefore, if text is highlighted in the report, it is an opportunity for them to learn and improve upon their citing skills before submitting the final paper to me for grading and before I generate a Turnitin Originality Report and review for plagiarism.
• Students had to be informed several times that both correctly and incorrectly cited material will be highlighted in the Originality Report and that it is their responsibility to review all highlighted material and make sure that all requirements for citations and direct quotes are present. Are the quote marks there? What about the page/paragraph numbers?
• Some students wanted to see a 0% on the report (zero unoriginal text) and a few who did read the User Guide wanted to select the option of not including quoted material in the report. I strongly advised against this option, since the purpose of Turnitin as a learning tool was to focus their attention on all quoted material so that they could make sure all requirements were present.
• Students also had to be reminded that Turnitin does have some limitations and that students are responsible for properly citing all sources whether or not they are highlighted in the  Originality Report. For example, the Turnitin report does not highlight and report text from books unless the text has been incorporated into a paper previously submitted to the Turnitin database.
• Lastly, I shared with students what I had learned about the Turnitin Helpdesk, which is accessed by e-mail only. There is an estimated 24-hour response time from the Helpdesk (longer at high-volume times) Monday through Friday only. So if a student e-mails the Helpdesk on Friday afternoon, he or she may not get a response until late Monday or Tuesday. Understanding the Turnitin Helpdesk response timeframe should be helpful for students in planning and managing their time.

Note: Thanks to Neal Pomea of UMUC Library Services for reviewing this document. For more information about using Turnitin at UMUC, visit the Information and Library Resources web site.