What is Turnitin.com, and how does it work?
Turnitin.com is web-based plagiarism detection software owned by Turnitin.com, Inc., and is available to instructors at Indiana University's Bloomington, Indianapolis, East, Kokomo, Northwest, South Bend, and Southeast campuses. Turnitin.com can be used as a deterrent, but also as an educational tool to teach students how to work with sources and to improve paraphrasing and quoting skills.
Students or instructors submit electronic versions of essays to Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com then produces an originality report. This report shows the instructor the results of Turnitin.com's comparison of the essay to content on the web, to Turnitin.com's database of student writing, and to some databases of common full-text journals.
The repository to which papers are compared currently consists of three primary databases:
- Both a current and an extensively archived copy of the publicly accessible Internet
- Commercial pages from books, newspapers, and journals
- Student papers already submitted to Turnitin
Papers can be submitted by teachers or students. Teachers can submit papers directly to Turnitin.com's web site. Students can also submit papers to Turnitin.com's web site or through the Assignments 2 tool in Oncourse.
If a student submits a paper, the teacher can allow the student to view the report; if the instructor makes the submission, the report is not available to the student. When using the Turnitin integration with Oncourse, originality reports are available within Oncourse; instructors may choose whether or not students can see them. See Oncourse Turnitin integration: Overview.
Turnitin.com offers guides and user manuals. Note that PeerMark is available only from the Turnitin site, not through Oncourse. Most GradeMark options are available through Oncourse, but students will be unable to view comments until after the due date for an assignment. For information about pilot testing these two features, contact your campus teaching and learning center.
For more about standards of academic integrity at IU, including disciplinary procedures for academic misconduct, see the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct.
Instructors at IUB may submit academic misconduct reports online.
Last modified on January 05, 2012.
