How does TurnItIn work?
Faculty members or students submit students' papers (or excerpts from 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 or the TurnItIn database.
To begin using TurnItIn with your classes…
simply click on the "create a new user profile" button on
the Turnitin.com homepage.
Then follow the on-screen directions. After you log in to your new account and
click on the “join account” button, enter Truman's account ID and
Truman's "account join" password. Truman's account ID and "account
join" password were e-mailed to faculty; if you do not still have that
e-mail, contact Chad Mohler at chmohler@truman.edu,
and he'll be sure to get the ID and password to you. (Note: Truman’s
“account join” password is different from your own password for
TurnItIn, which you can make anything 6-12 characters long that you want.)
If you are having students submit their papers themselves…
suggest to them that they follow the step-by-step tutorial found at http://www.turnitin.com/usage/student_quickstart.html.
They will need from you the class’s enrollment password (which you establish
when you first set up the class) and the class’s ID (which is the red
number next to the class on the “your classes” page that appears
when you first log in to TurnItIn).
You can do peer-review assignments
through TurnItIn, too!
Many of you may not know that TurnItIn's website can be used to conveniently
manage your students' exchange and (anonymous) reviewing of each other's
papers. The site can do nifty things like
randomly distributing to each student a instructor-specified number of papers to review;
keeping track of who has and who has not reviewed which assignments;
displaying the contents and summaries of the reviews.
Download a PowerPoint presentation with all the details at http://tltr.truman.edu/FacPeerReview.ppt.
If you need help…
at any time after you have set up your account and log in, simply
click on the “Help!” button at the top of every screen. A help page
will open with lots of good info for you to consult. By clicking on the “helpdesk”
button on the help page, you can also contact TurnItIn’s support staff
with questions you may have.
A good general overview of TurnItIn can be found at http://www.turnitin.com/static/training.html.
On that page, click on either the "tutorials and quickstarts" link
or the "user manuals" link.
If none of this info helps you solve your problem, feel free to contact Chad
Mohler at chmohler@truman.edu.
A suggestion from TLTR…
As you begin using TurnItIn in your classes, we on the TLTR
strongly encourage you to continue discussing with your students the importance
of academic honesty and the differences between academically honest and academically
dishonest work. We hope that the TurnItIn trial serves as a stimulus for continued
campus discussion of academic integrity and what we as a community can do to
promote it.
General questions-and-answers about Truman’s TurnItIn
trial…
can be found at http://tltr.truman.edu/acadintegrity.html.
The trial will run through May 18, 2003. After that time, TLTR will assess the
effectiveness and rate of faculty participation in the trial, and Truman will
subsequently decide whether to purchase a subscription to TurnItIn's service.