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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 [i]moderately[/i] 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. [url= http://www.turnitin.com/self-service/system-status.html ]Service status pages[/url] worth keeping an eye on.
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.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 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.