Some Thoughts on Turnitin

Sorry for not posting last week. I was tied up early in the week preparing for our Turnitin workshops, and then I had to go out of town to close on our house outside of Birmingham. I promise to make up for the missed post with one or two extras this week. But since I spent so much time working on Turnitin last week, I thought I would write about that here.

Turnitin is a powerful anti-plagiarism tool that is typically used to catch students who dangerously (or ignorantly) push the limits of academic honesty, and, indeed, it is most popular among faculty as a police mechanism, as a tool to apprehend students who play too loose with “the rules.”

And that is fine, to an extent.

The problem arises, however, when we realize that, perhaps, students don’t know the rules. Or, worse yet, that students have an unsophisticated understanding of them, and therefore an inadequate appreciation of what makes them so important.

As is typical with most everything else involving the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, a “thou shalt not” approach will often not work, and can just as frequently backfire. Recognizing this when deciding how to use Turnitin can not only improve the effectiveness of your plagiarism prevention efforts, it can also create new teaching opportunities that can extend those efforts beyond just your current assignment.

For example, I was recently working with a faculty member on how to use Turnitin. She had given her students a famous essay in her field and had asked them to summarize it. As is consistent with new policies that USA will be implementing soon, she had also had her students email their files to her so that she could submit them to Turnitin to protect their identity, which she did one at a time. What she realized was that each time she added a new student paper, the percentages in the originality reports got increasingly worse.

I suppose many faculty’s gotcha meters would have red-lined about that point, but she wisely decided that rather than signaling widespread cheating on the part of her students, what it really signified was a significant misunderstanding on the part of virtually all of her students on what is appropriate in regard to quoting, paraphrasing, and citing. So instead of failing all of her students on the assignment, she decided to use the originality reports from Turnitin to show them what they were doing wrong, as well as to give her students opportunities to get better on the next couple of assignments before bringing the hammer down.

The beauty of this approach is that not only are they learning from and about famous essays, they are also learning how to write about (and from) them appropriately.