General information on the
plagiarism detection component of TurnItIn.com

 

How does TurnItIn.com work?

Faculty members or students submit the students' papers (or excerpts from the students’ papers) to the TurnItIn.com website. TurnItIn runs the papers through databases and a general Internet search and gives back to the faculty member a hyperlinked copy of the text, indicating where passages from the paper (if any) came from the Internet.  Click here to view a sample “originality report" (the link's URL is http://www.turnitin.com/static/popups/sample_report.html).

 

How extensive is the search that TurnItIn performs on submitted papers?

TurnItIn compares each paper against the more than 1.5 billion pages on the Internet, including cheat sites and paper mills. It also compares the papers against the hundreds of thousands of papers previously submitted to TurnItIn.

 

Does TurnItIn detect plagiarized papers written in foreign languages?

Turnitin.com works for papers written in most western languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, among others).

 

How long after a paper is submitted does it take to get TurnItIn.com’s report on the paper?

Reports are posted to the faculty member’s TurnItIn account within 4-6 hours of the paper’s submission.

 

Does TurnItIn help to curb the sort of plagiarism where students submit papers to a course that were written by students who took the course in previous semesters?

If a faculty member requires her or his students to submit their papers to TurnItIn, those papers will be added to the TurnItIn database, so that students in subsequent semesters will not be able to portray those papers as their own.

 

Does it take a lot of work on the faculty member’s part?

No. As noted above, a faculty member can require her or his students to do the work of submitting their papers to the TurnItIn site before they submit them for the course— the faculty member will still get the originality reports for the class when he or she logs on to the TurnItIn site. Alternatively, the faculty member can use TurnItIn to “spot check” just those papers he or she suspects of plagiarism.

 

Does submitting papers to TurnItIn violate any student privacy rights or copyrights they may have to their own (non-plagiarized) papers?

No— TurnItIn does not actually maintain a word-for-word copy of the papers in their databases. Instead, it keeps a “digital footprint” of the paper, a number that TurnItIn uses to encode the content of the paper (using a complex algorithm).  Both TurnItIn.com’s legal counsel and Truman’s own legal counsel agree that TurnItIn does not violate student privacy rights or copyrights.

 

Should a faculty member mention to her or his students that he or she will be using TurnItIn’s service toward the end of the spring semester?


As a courtesy to one’s students, and as a deterrent to academic dishonesty, it is a good idea for a faculty member to give notice to her or his students of the intent to use TurnItIn. Here are two sample notices:

 

If the faculty member plans on having students submit their own papers to TurnItIn:
This semester Truman is undertaking a trial of TurnItIn.com, a plagiarism detection service. To protect those of you who do not attempt plagiarism, all students in the course will be required to submit their written work to TurnItIn. Instructions on how to do so will be forthcoming.

If the faculty member plans on submitting students’ papers herself or himself to TurnItIn:
This semester Truman is undertaking a trial of TurnItIn.com, a plagiarism detection service. You should know that in order to protect those of you who do not attempt plagiarism, I may, from time to time, be submitting to TurnItIn the written work of students in this course.

 

I have some further questions about TurnItIn. Who can I ask?

You can contact a division / department representative to TLTR or the co-chair of the TLTR committee, Chad Mohler (x6034 or chmohler@truman.edu).