Turnitin allows educators to check students’ work for improper citation or potential plagiarism by comparing it against continuously updated databases using the industry’s most advanced search technology. Every Originality Report provides instructors with the opportunity to teach their students proper citation methods as well as to safeguard their students’ academic integrity. [ from Turnitin]

 

If you would like a Turnitin account, please contact the appropriate person below:

Education - Susan Bannon (844-4291)

Liberal Arts - Wiebke Kuhn (844-2056)

All other departments - Brandon Simmons (844-5181)

 

FERPA Issues:

You can submit a paper (as long as there are no identifying marks on it) and use it for plagiarism detection and prosecution. However, if you require your students to submit a paper, you cannot use the plagiarism report. If a student submits a paper, then it is only for him or her to use as away to doublecheck that they are not plagiarizing.

 

So, if a student submits, then you cannot use it to punish the student.
However, you can submit it later and take legal action.

 

For help on the new Turnitin interface. This includes student and instructor Flash videos.

 

For help on the old interface:

1. Go to turnitin.com and log on with your userid = your AU email address and the password from turnitin's email.
   
   
   
2. After the initial set-up of a user profile, create a new class. (Note: if you want your students to register for your class, remember the class ID number and enrollment password)
   
   
3. Click on the blue class title to enter the class.
   
   
   
   
4. Create a new assignment.
   
   
   
5. Submit a draft to the assignment. (Note: as this draft is stored in turnitin's student paper database, make sure that no personal information is part of the draft; this is also something students need to remember.)
   
   
   
6. View the Originality Report to determine if the draft has a problem with plagiarism or not by clicking on the colored rectangle associated with the draft in the report column. The Originality Report will show in color code (1) how much of a draft is parallel to other documents (blue=little to no problem; orange and red=high percentage of parallel text), and (2) which passages are associated with what hyperlink.
   

If you want your students to register for your class, you will need to give them the course enrollment ID number and the password. First-time users need to go to turnitin.com and establish a profile under New User. They will be asked to provide some personal information besides the course information. Students who have a turnitin account from a previous class will need to remember their password (turnitin will send them an email if they have forgotten the password), and once they are logged on, they need to click on join class at which point they are asked to provide the course ID and your class's password. Once students are a member of your course, they can submit their own drafts.

 

Note that faculty have additional options once they have entered a class: under preferences, they can decide if students can also see their own or other students' originality reports (the default is that only faculty can see the reports); master classes can be used to run multiple sections with only one set of assignments that can be pushed to the individual sections; and some additional items become available. Note also that turnitin will interface with Blackboard, so that faculty and students will not need to log on to multiple places but will be able to take advantage of turnitin from inside Blackboard's Assignment tool.