Turn-It-In

Plagiarism Prevention System

Turn-It-In technology (http://turnitin.com) is available to DePaul faculty to verify originality of student work. The technology is based on prior submissions to Turn-It-In as well as public sources against which a student's current submission is compared. All papers submitted by DePaul are places within a seperate node on the Turn-It-In site, allowing DePaul full access to the Turn-It-In database but preventing other institutions from searching the DePaul papers. After comparison, Turn-It-In gives the faculty member a report on the probability of plagiarism, though the final decision whether the work constitutes a violation of DePaul's Academic Integrity Policy is made by the DePaul course instructor.

Interpreting the results from Turn-It-In

When a paper is evaluated, TurnItIn.com provides an originality report which identifies text in the evaluated project or paper that is similar to or identical to text in the TurnItIn.com database. Faculty must evaluate the quality of the report independently and determine if the parts identified by TurnItIn.com are similar or identical, are actually plagiarized texts.

As all matches are shown, even those cited properly by the student will appear in the originality report. As a result, faculty must analyze the TurnItIn.com report, use their judgement about the report and the student's work, and follow University policy before approaching a student about possible plagiarism. If the faculty member suspects plagiarism for a work reported by Turn-It-In as "original," the faculty member should investigate further since the work may have been copied but not yet included in the Turn-It-In comparative database.

Note: The Turn-It-In originality report lists the first occurrence of the match, which may not follow the source citation that the student used in his/her paper; the faculty member should remember that if the material the student has used is found in many places on the Web, the student's citation mayb be correct even though it doesn't match the source found by Turn-It-In.

Including information on Turn-It-In in a course syllabus

If a faculty member anticipates the possibility of using the Turn-It-In service in a particular course, the course syllabus should include language that informs the students of that fact. For instance, faculty may choose to include a statement such as the following: "Please be aware that any written work submitted in this course may be verified using Turn-It-In technology in order to ensure that the work is the student's own creation and not in violation of the University's Academic Integrity Policy. Submission of work in this course constitutes a pledge that the work is original and consent to have the work submitted to verify that fact."

How to get started: Request an account by filling in and submitting the Turn-It-In Account Request form.
Note: You must be an instructor and will be required to use your Campus Connection login to access this form.
Then print out a copy of this two-page, "Getting Started" Quickguide for more information.

Turn It In Access: http://www.turnitin.com/ Request your Turn-It-In account below.

To Learn More: Refer to documentation (below) for quickguides. In addition, group training is available for this technology tool.

Documentation

Many of the documents available this page are in Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) format. To access these documents, download a free copy of Adobe's Adobe Acrobat® Reader® from Adobe.com.