Information AboutTurnitin |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT TURNITIN | |
| educational software | |
| plagiarism detectors | |
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The company iParadigms, LLC also offers other services aimed at the educators' market, such as grade marking and Peer Review services. They also offer a plagiarism detection service aimed towards newspaper editors and book publishers called IThenticate , and run the informational website Plagiarism.org. SCANNING AND DETECTION CAPABILITIES Turnitin can scan its own database(s), and also has licensing agreements with large academic proprietary databases. Turnitin's repository currently consists of three primary databases:
STUDENT PAPER DATABASE The essays students submit are stored as part of the Database used to check for plagiarism. This prevents the use of one student's paper by another student by identifying matching text between papers. This way the student's Intellectual Property (or that of the University , in some cases) is protected from future plagiarism. Turnitin is often questioned about this approach to dealing with submitters' intellectual property. By keeping a single database of all papers submitted by its users, it appears Turnitin is potentially infringing on the work of students who do not provide the service with an implicit permission to permanently keep their papers in the database for commercial uses. Turnitin's EULA claims archiving of student papers complies with U.S. laws protecting student intellectual property and privacy. {Link without Title} CLASSROOM INTEGRATION Teachers may submit student papers to Turnitin.com as individual files, a bulk upload, or a ZIP file. Teachers can also set up the assignment analysis options so that each student can review their originality reports before their final submission. A peer-review option is also avilable, should instructors wish to use that service in their courses. Some Virtual Learning Environment s can be configured to support Turnitin, so that student assignments can be automatically submitted for originality analysis. Both WebCT and Blackboard support Turnitin integration with course sections and assignments. One advantage of this integration is that students do not need to register for an account on the Turnitin website. While teachers using the service may automatically give a failing grade to a paper that is not submitted through Turnitin, this is done at the teacher's discretion and not Turnitin's. Because of the seriousness with which schools want to identify and discourage plagiarism, teachers may insist on submitting student papers to Turnitin. Turnitin acts as a tool for identifying matching text but it is not the final word on whether plagiarism has occurred. Teachers using the service try to discern if matching text identified by Turnitin is an unreferenced source or mere coincidence as opposed to outright plagiarism. Schools set their own standards of academic integrity and each have their own Honor Code , which Turnitin does not dictate, but can be used to help enforce. VIEWS OF TURNITIN Students do not want to be automatically viewed as deceitful, so there is objection from them on the grounds that using Turnitin is a Presumption Of Guilt . Teachers, however, feel that students' awareness that papers will be run through a search for matching text acts as a Deterrent . Teachers use Turnitin despite these student objections because schools want a way to combat Paper Mill s, custom writing services, and other online industries that sell access to prewritten academic essays. Students who use such services to take credit for a paper they did not write are almost always in violation of a school's code of student conduct. {Link without Title} In one well-publicized dispute over mandatory Turnitin submissions, a student named Jesse Rosenfeld at McGill University declined to pass his academic work along to Turnitin. The University Senate eventually ruled that Rosenfeld's assignments were to be graded without the use of Turnitin. {Link without Title} An August 2001 editorial by cited a study of Turnitin by the University Of Melbourne , claiming that plagiarism fell by half when detection software was used. {Link without Title} SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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