Hilary 2011 - IT Services - University of Oxford

Using Turnitin for Plagiarism Detection
and Prevention
Turnitin is an online text matching system that can be
used to help with the identification of potential plagiarism
in electronically submitted student work. It can also
be used in a formative way, for tutors to help students
develop their academic writing and citation skills.
If you use Turnitin or are simply just curious then why
not follow our dedicated Turnitin Blog called Turnitin At
Oxford, see http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/tii/
Studies on the use of Turnitin
Two reports have recently been released about the use of
Turnitin in terms of its effectiveness, and student access
to originality reports.
Oxford University has a subscription to the UK Turnitin
service, so university staff members may use it at no
cost to their departments. Oxford University Computing
Services manages the service and creates instructor
accounts on request (send email to turnitin@oucs.
ox.ac.uk). OUCS offers lunch time training sessions for
staff members (bookings are essential) and guidance is
available within WebLearn on the Plagiarism Support site.
The WebLearn Assignments tool has an integration
feature with Turnitin, which means that students do not
require any additional passwords or instructions on how
to submit their assignments. Student Administration
is running a pilot project to investigate policy and
procedures for using the WebLearn/Turnitin integration
for examined work.
OUCS is currently working with the Proctors’ Office and
the Education Policy Support Unit to consolidate all the
guidance about the formative and summative use of
Turnitin into a single source of information for use across
the university. The document is still in the draft stage,
but after approval, it will be available on all the relevant
websites.
ITLP Portfolio- Top 20 Downloads
The White Paper ‘The Effectiveness of Turnitin and
WriteCycle’ reports on the use of Turnitin worldwide in
helping to ‘reduce serious incidents of unoriginal content
in student work and to produce better writers across the
entire curriculum’ (p.3). Continued use of the system can
help to support students in developing responsible writing
skills in a ‘cut-and-paste culture’ (p.3).
Martin King, Senior Learning & Technology Officer, Royal
Holloway College, University of London, conducted a
study on Turnitin practices in UK HE institutions. This
study, entitled ‘Student access to Originality Reports’,
considered the following questions:
• are students permitted to interact with Turnitin?
• is access to the Originality Reports denied or allowed?
• what sort of access is supported?
• what are the reasons behind these decisions?
It was found that allowing students to view their
Originality Reports is educational, formative, and
can form the basis for discussing and learning about
acceptable academic writing practices.
The ITLP Portfolio is our online collection of the materials we use on our taught courses.
You can find it in the ‘Quick Links’ at www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/
The service is proving very popular. In the last 12 months there were 7553 downloads of
our course books. Here’s the top 20.
Rank Number of downloads Course
1 264 Excel: Fundamentals
2 223 Access: Fundamentals
3 178 Word: Managing your thesis
4 169 Excel: Functions and cell referencing
5 166 Word: Fundamentals
6 161 Word: Building long documents
7 160 Word: Creating professional documents
8 153 InDesign: Introduction
9 150 EndNote: Introduction
10 149 Digital Images: Photoshop introduction
11 147 PowerPoint: Fundamentals
12 146 Excel: Pivot tables
13 145 Access: Database structure
14 140 Excel: Lists and querying data
15 132 Access: Creating queries , forms and reports
16 128 Excel: Arrays, macros and VBA
17 128 Statistics: Introduction
18 128 WebLearn: Fundamentals
19 121 EndNote: Building your library
20 119 Excel: Fundamentals
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