Turnitin: Faculty Introduction
Purpose: to provide a system for encouraging students to produce original, ethical writing and allowing faculty
an easy method of monitoring student work. It will become a tool for enforcing the school Integrity Policy.
Expectation of use: As this program is most effective as a total school-wide initiative, it is expected that all faculty in all departments will require their students to enroll and use Turnitin and that faculty will systematically check “originality reports” generated by student submissions.
- This applies to all formal writing assignments which are research-based, position papers, opinions, reports, or analysis.
- This is not appropriate for personal reflections or journal writing, or other casual in-class writing.
- After students have submitted their typed essays through Turnitin, they must submit them to their teacher as well for grading; this can be done in either an electronic or hardcopy format as the teacher prefers. Handwritten work cannot be sent through Turnitin.
What can Turnitin do? - Places the burden of proof for demonstrating originality upon the student herself.
- Provides substantiated source information to the teacher.
- Acts as a deterrent for overt student plagiarism.
- Allows drafts of papers and student self-checks at the teacher’s discretion.
- Can be used as a teaching tool in early grades, gradually evolving to blind submissions in later grades.
- Scans all internet sources and the body of all student work of all participating schools nationwide, including a growing body of Mercy work as we continue to use the system.
What will Turnitin NOT do?- It does not take the teacher out of the decision-making/monitoring process. Specifically, the program does not “accuse” a student of plagiarism, but rather shows incidents and percentages of verbiage matches with other sources in its database.
- The teacher can direct the program to eliminate quoted material, which will likely take care of most of the matches. The remaining matches are displayed and can be quickly scanned to determine if they are incidental or meaningful matches.
- The program will not detect carefully and cleverly paraphrased ideas and concepts which are borrowed from texts. The teacher will have to see if such ideas are documented in the parenthetical MLA style. Suspicious concepts can be challenged. This usually is enough; our students tend not to go to the trouble of rewriting ideas so completely as to fool the system.
- For convenience’s sake a teacher may want to set an acceptability percentage level to trigger a closer investigation. That percent may vary from assignment to assignment. Or, occasional spot checks or teacher intuition may trigger a closer look at the originality report.
- The program will not check for correct MLA documentation format. This, however, is easily and quickly done with a glance.
Training protocol:- Greg will give an electronic demonstration of use at a near future date tba.
- Academic Council will discuss and carry information and to the departments.
- Small group demonstrations and help sessions will be offered to individuals or departments over the course of the next couple months. Just ask!!
Getting Started:- Go to the website www.turnitin.com
- Click on to the “new user” button at top right of home page. You will be prompted to check “student” or “instructor”.
- Then set up your own personal account profile as prompted; you will need this information
- your account name Mother of Mercy High School
- your account ID 47934
- your account join password bobcat11
- you will use your own Mercy email address when prompted
- you will be prompted to create your own account password when you fill out the registration
- use “startup wizard” link to set up your classes; you will need a class name and code word to give students to enroll; the system will provide a course id number to give students as well.
- Instruct students to enroll. You may want to set up a Blackboard link for them. They will also go to the “new user” button, but will select “student” and follow the prompts, using the course code and password you have provided them. Later this fall the system may run through Blackboard. Stay tuned.
- follow links to tutorials and student handouts of research tips (or see web addresses below)
Useful web addresses for help with Turnitin: these will soon be on the Faculty organization page of Blackboard as direct links for your convenience.
Instructor quickstart video Page for student handouts and research tips Questions or HELP!
(510) 287-9720 ext. 241
or
http://www.turnitin.com/help