Student consent
It is important that students are aware that the Turnitin service is being used for their assignments and that they consent to it.
Staff no longer need to gather student signatures. In 2005 the College Academic Misconduct Officers decided that every student assignment will be submitted with a coversheet.
The coversheet will ask students to verify via a tick box system that their work is in no way plagiarised. On the bottom of the coversheet will be the information about the plagiarism detection service (Turnitin).
Staff need to ensure that students understand that their work will go to the plagiarism detection software's database.
Here is an example of text for inclusion in course books:
Sample statement for students
The plagiarism detection service is an online service that enables institutions and staff to carry out electronic comparison of students' work against electronic sources including other students' work.
The service is managed by The University of Northumbria on behalf of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is available to all UK tertiary education institutions by subscription.
The plagiarism detection service works by executing searches of the world wide web, and extensive databases of reference material, as well as content previously submitted by other users.
Each new submission is compared with all the existing information.
The software makes no decisions as to whether a student has plagiarised, it simply highlights sections of text that are duplicated in other sources. All work will continue to be reviewed by the course tutor.
Once work has been submitted to the system it becomes part of the ever growing database of material against which subsequent submissions are checked.
The software is used as a tool to highlight any instance where there is a possible case of plagiarism. Passages copied directly or very closely from existing sources will be identified by the software and both the original and the potential copy will be displayed for the tutor to view. Where any direct quotations are relevant and appropriately referenced, the course tutor will be able to see this and will continue to consider the next highlighted case. There is an on-line demonstration of the system available at https://www.submit.ac.uk/
This article was published on Sep 12, 2011