Detecting plagiarism and collusion using Turnitin

'Turnitin' is software that has been integrated with DSO to detect text in assignment submissions that may not be original. Turnitin generates an 'originality report' that sets out the quantity and source of any text that is matched with other sources in the Turnitin database. Text submitted to Turnitin is checked against:

• about six billion websites - both current and archived versions
• academic journals
• many 'online classic' texts and some textbooks
• papers submitted by other students anywhere in the world where Turnitin submission has been used - including submissions from previous semesters.

Types of plagiarism Turnitin can't detect

Turnitin does not detect some types of plagiarism. These include:

• plagiarism of ideas or structure
• plagiarism of images - including any non-text material such as charts, tables, computer code or musical notation presented in image form
• plagiarism of text written in non-Latin script
• plagiarism of text that is not in the Turnitin database, eg most books, papers submitted previously to university but not to Turnitin, and papers submitted to Turnitin but not stored in the Turnitin database
• when someone else writes a student's paper
• recently modified webpages, eg eNewspaper pages that change daily.

Using Turnitin

To use Turnitin, create a dropbox folder and select the setting to 'enable plagiarism detection' in the DSO site for your unit. You can use the advanced settings to determine whether a student's originality report is visible to teaching staff only, or to the student as well. It is strongly recommended that lecturers allow students to view their reports - particularly undergraduates and those with little understanding or skills in academic writing. Students will only see the originality reports generated for their own papers.

You should also instruct your students to use the originality report that they will receive for assignments they submit to this dropbox to check their work for plagiarism. Communicating effectively with your students about how and why Turnitin is being used in your unit will be vital to its success in helping students learn about plagiarism. See Setting up a dropbox with plagiarism detection for more information.

Note: You will need to use several steps to interpret a Turnitin originality report to decide whether or not a student has plagiarised or colluded. Using the raw percentage of matched material Turnitin has identified alone can be misleading.