Turnitin Samia Ahmed Nadi Student ID: P67778 Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Overview What is ‘Turnitin’? Functions How it works How to interpret Turnitin report Drawbacks Challenges Litigation References Bibliography

What is Turnitin? An Internet-based plagiarism-prevention service created by iParadigms, LLC. A “text matching” or “plagiarism detection” software. Universities and high schools buy licenses to submit essays to the Turnitin website. Checks for potential unoriginal content by comparing submitted papers to several databases using a proprietary algorithm.

Functions Scans its own databases, and also has licensing agreements with large academic proprietary databases. Contains a copy of the publicly accessible internet, with the company using a webcrawler to continually add to the web archive, observing for robots.txt exclusions. Contains commercial pages from books, newspapers, and journals. The essays submitted by students are stored in a database used to check for plagiarism.

How the technology works After submission, the document goes to a proprietary algorithm that in a sense is used to map the text. The mapping is done using digital fingerprints. That fingerprint gets compared with the finger print of the database. All the databases of the contents are similarly indexed and finger printed.

Key points To consider a match, a section of text must be greater than 6 words in the length. No more than a hundred thousand matches will be found for any given document.

Similarity match A high similarity match does not necessarily mean plagiarism. It could be because: i.There is an overuse of direct quotations within the work. ii.Common phrases or series of words are being used that are the same. A low match does not necessarily mean that plagiarism has not occurred as: i.Some sections may be plagiarized or copied. ii.There are increasingly sophisticated methods.

Interpreting report

Interpreting report (contd.)

Advantages Fast and authoritative. Accurate reports from the world’s largest comparison database. Simple to use.

Drawbacks

Drawbacks (contd.) Similarity score can be high by using “Headers and Footers” that have the document title included on every page of work. Similarity index can be high because of the reference list.

Drawbacks (contd.) Depends on the user whether include quotes or bibliography in the scan or not. It is advised to exclude quoted material and bibliography to refine results.

Challenges Will not catch everything. Can be circumvented by ghostwriters. Results are always subject to instructor interpretation. Submission of multiple drafts of the same paper it keep recognizing the previous submission.

Litigation The U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) prohibits disclosing confidential information about students to third parties without their or their families' permission [1]. Critics of Turnitin argue that sending papers to Turnitin without student permission thus violates their rights [1]. Since Turnitin archives all papers which it receives and it sells its services including that database, for profit, the company has also been charged with violating student copyright since creators are granted exclusive reproduction rights by Title 17 of the United States Code [2]. A few Canadian universities are currently in the process of either total or partial ban of this service [3]. On March 6, 2006, the Senate at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia prohibited the submission of students’ academic work to Turnitin.com and any software that requires students' work to become part of an external database where other parties might have access to it [3]. At Ryerson University (Toronto), students may decide whether to submit their work to Turnitin.com or make alternate arrangements with the instructor [4].

References [1] Foley & Lardner; July 2002; Turnitin U.S. Legal Document, retrieved September 29, 2006,pp. 2, 5 [2] Foley & Lardner, Id., pp. 3-5 [3] "Minutes of Meeting". Mount Saint Vincent University Senate Retrieved [4] "Turnitin.com Information for Students". Ryerson University Retrieved

Bibliography 1) [Last accessed on 13/11/2013] 2) [Last accessed on 13/11/2013] 3) Plagiarism Detection Software -- Benefits & Limitations [Last accessed on 13/11/2013] 4) Oxford Brookes University: How to Interpret Turnitin reports [Last accessed on 13/11/2013]

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