Faculty Affairs and Professional Development

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Turnitin

Turnitin @ SFSU

San Francisco State University has recently renewed its license for Turnitin, the world's leading anti-plagiarism software. The program is utilized in thousands of institutions throughout the global academic community, and enjoys a proven track record in helping faculty teach their students the importance of correct citation. CTFD Faculty Associate Amy Love is conducting a series of Turnitin Workshops throughout the Spring semester to assist in its implementation.

Preface: Faculty Responsibility for Dealing with Cheating and Plagiarism

SF State faculty are responsible for handling academic dishonesty and reporting the action taken to the judicial affairs office. (In the College of the Humanities, reports are submitted through the Associate Dean who forwards them on.) Your actions must be consistent with the student’s infraction. You may give no credit or fail to the plagiarized assignment, which may cause the student to fail the class. You may not give the student a failing grade for the course if failure on the plagiarized assignment would not result in F/NC for the course according to the terms of the syllabus.

Relevant Documents

The Pedagogical Challenges of Plagiarism

Students have always plagiarized or failed to cite completely, but technology has made this practice easier:

  • Based on a review of the literature and their own study, Weinstein and Dobkin (2002) find roughly one out of every five or six student papers is plagiarized.
  • In a survey of over 40,000 undergraduates, “51% … acknowledged at least one incident of serious cheating on written work.” Of these, four out of five reported that their cheating included cutting and pasting from the Internet or downloading product from a paper mill. (McCabe, 2005, p. 27)

Faculty are exhorted to prevent plagiarism by making assignments unique and relevant, but all assignments are open to small-scale plagiarism and even the most exciting assignment may attract a plagiarism from students who don’t feel up to the challenge, especially those juggling school, work and family. Without specialized software, teachers are left to the difficult task of identifying plagiarized work and finding the source is time-consuming and difficult without specialized software.

  • Internet search engines find plagiarism only if the teacher senses a problem and the source material is on the web.
  • Many of the free papers on the Internet and even some of the papers-for-pay are indistinguishable from marginal student work. (Faber & Lindsay, 1999).
  • Students also submit work from their peers, not Internet sources. Bloomfield (as cited in Weinstein & Dobkin, 2002) finds that 3% of essays matched previously submitted work.

Teachers become especially frustrated by this work, framing the activity in moral terms, seeing plagiarism as a capital crime, resenting time spent in uncovering what they believe is dishonesty (Valentine, 2006).

Yet plagiarism doesn’t always come from a desire to take the easy way out:

  • At a mechanical level, students may not know how to cite outside material completely and correctly.
  • As a literacy practice (Valentine, 2006), the appropriate use of sources is culturally-situated. What is plagiarism to faculty at SF State may be good and honest work in other cultures.
  • Students may have a naďve view of the writing process and naturally value writing less if they don’t see it as a way to make meaning,
  • They many be unclear as to how much original writing is required or how to use outside sources to support their own ideas.

How Turnitin Changes This

Faculty can encourage students to see the complexity of proper use of sources, offering Turnitin as a tool for students to use in this work, submitting their essays themselves. While this approach has the obvious advantage of relieving teachers of much of the detective work, it does much more, letting students know explicitly that proper citation is their responsibility and implicitly that plagiarism will not be tolerated.

Turnitin allows teachers to easily identify errors arising from ignorance: why else would a student fail to cite work clearly flagged by the system as a quotation? Turnitin also provides statistics showing what percent of each essay matches other sources, allowing teachers to comment on over- or under- reliance on sources. With this tool, we can largely leave aside the adversarial approach to plagiarism and return to our teaching objectives.

Using Turnitin

To support faculty in their efforts to promote academic integrity, SFSU has recently renewed its license for the plagiarism detection product Turnitin. Since our last license expired, the product has undergone a number of changes, including:

  • Turnitin is now integrated with both iLearn, so you will not have to set up separate courses or give students enrollment IDs.
  • In the past, you needed to set up revision assignments to prevent students for being flagged as plagiarizing themselves. This is no longer necessary though you may still choose to set up revision assignments in order to track your students work.
  • You’ll find a choice of report formats and useful options such as “eliminate words in quotations.”

See also “Sample Syllabus Statements” and “Sample Turnitin Instructions for Students.”

Tools for Turnitin

Have questions?

Academic Technology provides technical support for Turnitin. Should you have questions in setting up your Turnitin, please call Academic Technology at 405-3536 (choose option 5) or email them at .

Additional Resources

Check out the article on Turnitin in the February 2007 edition of the CTFD newsletter The Garden .