WebCT Conferences

What Is Turnitin?

Turnitin takes papers, reviews them for originality, and generates an originality report.

This report is available to both students and instructors, so that students can see if they are in violation and correct the paper before submitting it for grading. It also can verify citations efficiently for you.

If it does detect plagiarism, it provides documentation for the incident.

It can detect papers copied in full, or papers copied from various sites (a paragraph here, another one there). It can also detect text that has been paraphrased from other text. Turnitin will give a report showing the percentage of copied content in the paper, as well as where this came from.

Turnitin and WebCT

The product runs in the WebCT environment. Turnitin adds several tools to the WebCT toolbox.

Papers are submitted using the Turnitin assignment tool (not the WebCT assignment tool). It is scanned automaitcally and reports are immediately made avaialble. The Turnitin GradeMark is integrated with the WebCT gradebook. Further integration is planned.

Turnitin does not support Campus 4.1, but does support Vista and CE 6.0. People using 4.1 can still use it but in an unintegrated manner.

How Turnitin Works

• Indexes over 5 billion pages of the Internet to search against.
• Published works through ProQuest, The Guttenburg project, etc.
• Cliff notes
• Over 11 million student papers submitted to Turnitin since 1996 provided by "paper mills" or previous papers submitted to Turnitin.

The instructor has some options for the reports. For example, they can tell whether to ignore text in quotes, or not, when calculating the originality score.

Other Features

Turnitin also offers a grading tool for papers. Select text in a page, and add comments based on your grading rubrics. For example, show capitalization problems, punctuation problems, etc. Can also add your own comments. The students can see all these in the corrected paper. The grading for this is integrated with the WebCT gradebook, so grades assigned by Turnitin go straight to the gradebook.

Reports can be created for students (to help them improve writing for papers). Can also be used by program chairs to evaluate what they need to change in the programs.

Pricing:

$0.75 per student for Turnitin. For an additional $0.25 per student you get the grading option too.

Technical Specifications:

• Implementation: WebCT frame at the top, turnitin at the bottom.


• Security: https over ssl


• Authentication based on an MD5 encryption on both sides using a shared secret key.


• Available for vista 3 and 4 and CE6.

Future plans:

• Peer review module


• user feedback sessions and design meetings


• WebCT integration 3.0

For more information:

For more information refer to http://plagiarism.org/. Visit the Turnitin web site at http://www.turnitin.com/.