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Turnitin.com

What is Turnitin.com? | Purpose | Getting Started (For Faculty | For Students) | Further Resources 

To help promote awareness of and the practice of academic integrity, Nichols College subscribes to Turnitin.com.

What Is Turnitin.com?

Turnitin.com is a web-based service that compares submitted student text against a database of millions previously published documents, including those on the public Internet, some library subscription databases, as well as every student paper ever submitted to Turnitin.com, including previously submitted Nichols papers. When similarities between student text and an existing document are found, Turnitin highlights those similarities in an annotated document, displaying both the student text and the original source(s).

Why You Might Consider Using Turnitin.com

Turnitin can be a great learning tool for students. They can review their papers before they hand them in and, if they find portions of their work have been flagged as possibly plagiarized, they have a chance to learn how to use sources properly without getting into any trouble.

Turnitin.com can be an excellent deterrent to plagiarism.

Please note, however, that while Turnitin.com can be a very useful took for students and faculty, no plagiarism service is infallible, and Turnitin.com should not take the place of an instructor's awareness of his/her students' writing styles.

Getting Started

For Faculty

Instructors can submit electronic versions of written works to Turnitin.com themselves, or they can have students submit their own papers, which in turn produces an "originality report." This report shows the instructor the results of Turnitin.com's comparison of the written work to content on the Web, to Turnitin.com's database of student writing, and to some databases of common full-text journals.

If a student submits a paper, the teacher can allow the student to view the report; if the instructor makes the submission, the report is not available to the student.

Instructors will need to set up an account in which you can create a file for each of your classes. You and or students can then submit papers to a class file in the Turnitin database.

Contact Jim Douglas [jim.douglas@nichols.edu | x2333] with the following information:

  1. Your name
  2. Your email address
  3. Your department

You will get an email that will include a temporary password, with instructions on how to access your account and change your password.

Turnitin offers the following guides/videos to help you use Turnitin.com:

If you have any questions or difficulties, please contact Jim Douglas. (x2333) or call toll free 877-266-2681.

For Students

The following guides/videos are available for getting started with Turnitin.com:

  • A short Student Quickstart (pdf), which you can read online and/or print
  • A short online Student Quickstart Video. A video explaining the features of the Originality Report that is generated after papers are compared with the Turnitin database is also available.
  • A more complete Student User Guide (pdf) is also available.

 

Further Resources

For faculty, Turnitin.com offers:

  • Suggestions for integrating plagiarism education into lesson plans
  • Tips for creating assignments that discourage plagiarism and encourage original thinking
  • Information on the causes of plagiarism today
  • Help with identifying different types of plagiarism, in particular plagiarism from the Internet
  • Printable handouts for students on plagiarism, proper citation, and paper writing

 

Research resources for students include:

  • Plagiarism defined, in easy-to-understand terms
  • Tips on how to avoid both Internet-based and conventional plagiarism
  • Guidelines for proper citation, and links to help with specific citation styles
  • Suggestions for developing good research and writing skills
  • Answers to frequently asked questions, including explanations for often misunderstood concepts like fair use, public domain, and copyright laws
  • Definitions for important research-related terms

 

 



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