Turnitin.com

There will be some teachers using Turnitin.com this semester as a teaching tool to help our students learn how to use research sources effectivley and avoid plagiarism.

Students will be submitting papers through the Turnitin.com website. Turnitin.com then produces an originality report that looks for material found on websites, in newspaper or magazine articles, or within papers that have been previously submitted to Turnitin.com. The students will be able to see this originality report as soon as they turn in the assignment. The student will then be able to see whether they have effectively paraphrased sources and used quotes where necessary. They will then be able to revise their paper if there are clear mistakes they have made in using sources.

Here is a link to an example of an originality report that was generated for an essay where I purposefully mixed original thoughts with sections copied from NY Times and Wall Street Journal articles. The plan is to prevent plagiarism and use this submission process as a teaching tool rather than try to catch plagiarism after it occurs.