Turnitin®UK

Introduction

Turnitin®UK is a plagiarism detection service which is integrated into Blackboard. This means it can also be used as an assignment submission service.

It can be used to check text based assignments for similarities with online internet resources (websites; electronic journals; etc.) and the work of other students of the university and between educational institutions around the world.

The role of Turnitin®UK is to educate students in the accepted methods of using and building on the work of others - see the University Statement on Academic Integrity and:

• Breaches of Assessment Regulations: Information for Staff (pdf).
• Breaches of Assessment Regulations: Information for Staff (Word).

Many instances of poorly referenced material are not a result of a deliberate intention to cheat on the student's part:

• Turnitin®UK guidance notes
• Turnitin®UK guidance notes

What does it do?

Turnitin®UK can be used to manage electronic submission of assignments. Lecturers have a number of options they can set, including accepting late submissions (which are clearly indicated) and generating Originality Reports.

When a student submits work, an email receipt is sent to their Bradford email address.

Submitted papers are then compared with documents in the Turnitin®UK database. An Originality Report is created from the number of matches found to these documents and the percentage of matching text is calculated. Turnitin®UK uses a colour code system to indicate a high or low percentage of matching text.

The Originality Report can be made available to students if the lecturer selects this option.

What it does not do

Turnitin®UK does not work on non-text materials such as graphics, pictures, diagrams, formulae and computer programs; and it cannot detect materials copied from print only sources.

The report does not differentiate between materials that have been correctly quoted with appropriate referencing and those that have not - that is an academic judgement for lecturers to make.

File Types and Size

Turnitin currently accepts the following file types for upload into an assignment:

• Microsoft Word® (including Word 2007)
• Corel WordPerfect®
• HTML
• Adobe PostScript®
• Plain text (TXT)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Portable Document Format (PDF)

The file size may not exceed 20 MB. Files of larger size may be reduced in size by removal of non-text content.

Documentation available:

• Quick Help
• Quick reference guide

Training courses are listed in the online Development Programme.

For general advice, please contact the Learning Technology Team via eLearning@bradford.ac.uk

Page last modified: Tuesday, October 11, 2011