Introduction

Students seem to have taken literally what Tom Lehrer urged in his skit about the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. (Although his advice can be found at numerous sites on the Web, directly quoting it here, ironically, would constitute plagiarism or at least violation of copyright.) The problem of plagiarism in written work by students has grown immensely in recent years because of the vast amount of information that is available in electronic form and easily “copied and pasted” into papers. (For a comprehensive listing of online literature about the problem, see the section on plagiarism in Maurice Crouse’s document about literature and writing.)

The University of Memphis has secured a site license for faculty to use TurnItIn to maintain a high level of academic integrity in written work by students. It is not required that you use it, but the experience of instructors who have used it is generally good. While it can detect plagiarism and furnish strong evidence against those students who plagiarize, its chief value lies in the encouragement it gives students to avoid plagiarism because of the guarantee that their written work will be checked for unoriginality.

TurnItIn.com has made the claim in its earlier documentation that its program is “the #1 web-based solution that lets educators and their students check written work for improper citation or misappropriated content” and that it “helps educators check students’ work for proper citation or possible plagiarism by comparing it against three continually updated content bases: billions of pages of web content, plus hundreds of millions of pages of proprietary content from subscription-based publications, and over 100 million student papers previously submitted to Turnitin” and identifies any matches that it finds between those pages and work submitted by students. You will recognize an unstated weakness: TurnItIn searches a selected portion (though certainly very large) of online materials and does not search any materials, such as books, that are in print-only format. TurnItIn does not “grade” papers, as some students believe; it merely reports the matches it finds, and it is up to instructors to deal with the reports as they see fit.

Gaining access to TurnItIn

Before you can use TurnItIn, you must request access to it through the Advanced Learning Center at The University of Memphis. The starting point is its document TurnItIn: Academic Integrity Software.

You will be asked to complete a checklist of steps you need to take, including becoming familiar with the Student Handbook, the Faculty Handbook, the Faculty Legal Advisory Statement provided by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding TurnItIn use by your students, and the training materials provided by TurnItIn.

After you complete the checklist, you will go to the document that gives you the information you need to gain access to TurnItIn and set up a user profile. This document is restricted to the university community, so you will have to give your university UUID and password to access it.

Help with TurnItIn

There are various training aids available on TurnItIn’s Instructor Training page to acquaint you with the program. The Instructor Quickstart Guide is a good place to start. For complete information you will need to consult the Instructor User Manual. (There are similar resources for students.)

If you have any questions or problems, you may consult TurnItIn’s online training materials or its Help Center, send a request to the University of Memphis Helpdesk, or send e-mail to the Advanced Learning Center.

You may also want to consult with experienced users of TurnItIn, who can give you valuable guidance both on the mechanics of the program and on the interpretation of the reports it generates.

Using TurnItIn

When you log in to TurnItIn.com to set up classes and the assignments for those classes, you will have various options, such as whether to allow late submissions or re-submissions and whether to let students see the originality reports for their papers.

When you set up classes, you will assign each one a name and an enrollment password. The name can be anything you choose, but it should be uniquely descriptive of the class (such as "2020_002_12f" or "US since 1877, sec. 2, Fall 2012"). The enrollment password can also be anything you choose, and you can even use the same enrollment password for more than one class. TurnItIn.com will furnish a unique course-identification number for each class you create. You have the option of enrolling the students yourself, but you can save yourself a lot of work if you have your students enroll themselves. To enable them to enroll themselves, you must give them the course-identification number and the enrollment password (they won't need the class name − the course-identification number will locate the proper class).

The classes on TurnItIn.com are not necessarily linked in any way with your classes here at The University of Memphis, although there is a way that you can enable plagiarism detection by TurnItIn through eCourseware if you wish. If you have several classes that have identical assignments, you could even create a single TurnItIn.com class for all of them. If the assignments are different or have different due dates, you should of course create separate classes to avoid confusion.

Here is a sample of the information you might give your students (replace the sample course name, class ID, and enrollment password with the appropriate information for your class):

Shortly after a student submits an assignment, TurnItIn will conduct its search and make available a report on what it has found. Using that report, you will be able to see what passages, if any, in the paper match passages in documents in the database. The documents in which the matches were found will be identified, and you generally will be able to link to those documents to view them in full, if you wish to do so. (If the matches are in papers submitted to TurnItIn.com by other students, however, because of legal issues about privacy you may view those papers in full only if you first secure permission from the instructors of the students who submitted them.)

The Office of Legal Counsel has provided the following statement that you should include in your course syllabus if you use TurnItIn.com: