If you do any teaching at all, do you or does your institution use ‘Turnitin’?

If so, what are its good points and what are its bad points?

Good points: It’s good at picking up plagiarism from a wide variety of sources, gives an overall figure & %s of similarity from each separate source which it highlights in the text using different coloured links.

Bad points: It’s just another thing to do in marking, moderating & admin procedure.

Work has to be uploaded to it separately assuming your institution uses a different platform (which our admin staff do then it is checked by academics). Although it now has functionality to allow marking & feedback so it potentially could be as a one-stop-shop. Our UG programme now uses this functionality.

it’s OK – gives a figure for level of plagiarism but often when you look harder (it makes that moderately easy) it’s actually not “really” copying, just using industry-consistent terminology, for example. Trouble is that “having a proper look” takes time, so you want to automate it

As a result, our place sets the % high enough to miss those effects and so actually allows for quite a degree of real copying before it alerts. Students also can submit provisionally and get a plagiarism score, edit their doc and then re-submit (I assume (but don’t actually know) that it doesn’t show them which passages are the ones that flagged up)

When we first got it, something was wrong and if a student resubmitted they flagged as 98% plagiarised from their own 1st attempt. I believe that’s now sorted

We do grading and feedback from the turnitin link – bit clunky but does work

Not a teacher, but have some experience from HE IT. Used here as much for submission management as for academic integrity. Not uncommon for deadlines to coincide with service outages/degradation which upsets a lot of students. We now advise them to check the service status twitter feed as a first step if they have trouble submitting. Service status pages worth keeping an eye on.

When we first got it, something was wrong and if a student resubmitted they flagged as 98% plagiarised from their own 1st attempt. I believe that’s now sorted

I went on a training course last week 😐 and there is a button to click when setting up an assignment (for example if it is formative) which prevents this happening. It is in ‘more settings’ so not everyone finds it.

I use it to mark all my first year essays as it means I can get the marks back to them quickly via Blackboard. In terms of the plagiarism, I quickly check essays and if I think there is a real issue, I pass it on to the staff member responsible. I haven’t used it in anger.

The students seem to respect it. And I understand it is part of my teaching life. It seems to work for both submission management and marking – both of which arent ideal, but I am not aware of a product which is. The biggest issue is unless you have the ipad app, you cant mark offline (like take your scripts on the train with you!), but I am always worried about loosing them anyway. Know some places are giving staff ipads to get round this!!

Also, being really honest, I like giving typed feedback as a dyslexic.