Turnitin at Oxford

Students are strongly advised against the use of websites claiming to check their work for plagiarism. A student recently uploaded their work, only to discover too late that the website concerned was potentially fraudulent. This has caused great distress and worry to the student in the run-up to an important examination. If you are concerned that your work includes plagiarised content you should recheck your work, revisit your sources and check that quotes are referenced correctly. Guidance on avoiding plagiarism is available from your tutor and your department.  
The University makes available the Turnitin Service to be used by tutors and students (via your tutor or supervisor) in detecting text that matches various electronic sources, including the internet. More information about the service is available here: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/turnitin/index.xml . If you have made use of a plagiarism detection website outside the university and you are concerned about it, you should contact your tutor or course supervisor immediately.

From Adam Marshall, WebLearn Service Manager:

It is planned to upgrade WebLearn to version 2.8-ox3 on Tuesday 25 September 2012 7-9am. There will be no service during this period.

In addition, the ‘Turnitin via WebLearn Assignments Tool’ service will be unavailable from 6pm on Monday 24th September probably until lunchtime on 25th September – we are not exactly sure how long the migration will take.

This migration is necessary as we need to migrate to a newer version of the Turnitin API. This migration will result in an improved Turnitin service via WebLearn with more improvements to come in the future.

Any assignments submitted during this period which are routed via Turnitin will be placed in a queue and will be submitted once the migration has completed. This will mean that Turnitin reports will take much longer than usual to be generated.

From iParadigms:

The Turnitin Academy provides online demonstrations of the various aspects of the software suite. Here are the latest offerings:

Assignments 2 in WebLearn has improved Turnitin functionality with more options available. The integration also supports GradeMark, an electronic marking and feedback facility with the ability to record voice comments.

A quick guide to using GradeMark can be found on the Plagiarism support site in WebLearn: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/info/plag/page/quick_guide_to

Some interesting observations from Jonathan Bailey.

The WebLearn Assignments tool enables a tutor or lecturer to set up an ‘assignment’, allowing students to upload electronic essays. WebLearn keeps track of submissions and allows online or offline marking and commenting on the essay. The tool is integrated with the Turnitin plagiarism awareness system  ̶  submissions can be sent through Turnitin automatically, with Originality Reports being returned in the WebLearn tool.

A new enhanced version of the WebLearn Assignments tool will be piloted over the summer: Assignments2. The primary advantage of the new tool is the significantly better Turnitin integration options: multiple attachments are possible, the tutor can select which repository to store the student paper in (if any) and which databases to match the paper against, and the assignment close date is now passed to Turnitin.

The pilot project will allow users to try out the new tool before it goes into the live system. It is possible to run both Assignments and Assignments2 in one WebLearn site, and assignments that exist in the current tool can be imported into the new version of the tool.

We invite current and potential users of the Assignments tool to test Assignments2 and contribute your ideas and requests. If you are interested in being involved please email weblearn@oucs.ox.ac.uk.

From iParadigms:

Turnitin recently added the ability to add coloured highlights with comments to student papers in GradeMark. Instead of only a plain yellow highlighter, you can now choose from five colours—blue, green, yellow, pink, and purple

After you highlight a passage, click on the highlight to add a comment bubble, or click on a QuickMark comment in the sidebar to associate the QuickMark to the highlight.

One great way to use these various highlights is to colour-code your feedback—for example, blue may be constructive feedback, green can be positive reinforcement, yellow can be comments on composition, pink may be comments on format, and purple can be comments on grammar.

Turnitin have produced a white paper which gives a list of 10 Types of Plagiarism. Primarily a US publication, it introduces its content thus:

“This white paper distills a study of thousands of plagiarized papers, providing examples of 10 distinct types of plagiarism that comprise the vast majority of unoriginal work in student papers. These types are defined across a spectrum of intent and have been given titles to reflect both the influence of the Web on plagiarism and to help make the definitions more meaningful to the generation of students who are “digital natives.””

You can download the paper from the Turnitin User Group pages.