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Turnitin FAQ
- How many passwords will I have?
If you are an instructor, you need:
- The department ID number and department password obtained from your chair
(used only when you set up your account for the first time).
- Your e-mail address and the password you will create for Turnitin.
- For each of your classes, you will create a password, and Turnitin will
assign your class an ID number. This is what your students will need.
- My user ID and password don't work.
On your initial visit to the Turnitin Web site, click the New Users link located in the upper right corner of the page. You can't login until after you've created a user profile for yourself.
Once you input your user type ("instructor" or "student"), you will be asked
for your department information if you are an instructor.
If you are a student, you will be asked to enter your class ID number and
password (get this from your instructor).
When creating the profile, make sure you type the number into the field
labeled "Account Join ID" and enter the alphanumeric password
next to "Account Join Password."
- Can't I just check suspicious papers using Google or another search
engine?
Turnitin can save lots of time, especially if you have many students.
Hunting through sources one-by-one is especially time-consuming. One of the
great advantages of Turnitin is that it runs reports almost immediately.
We recommend doing a Google search and turning to other resources after you've
run the Turnitin report with no success. Turnitin is not the final verdict
on whether a paper is plagiarized - it's just a search engine which locates
matching text.
- Turnitin flagged this as plagiarism, but it's a direct quote. The student
has cited it correctly.
Turnitin does find direct quotes. If you discover that the quote
is cited properly and you'd like to remove it from the Originality Report,
you can use a feature called "re-analyze and exclude" to quickly re-run an
accurate report.
- What are resources I can use to teach my students about plagiarism?
USM Libraries has created a Plagiarism Tutorial. This interactive tutorial
helps students learn about when they need to cite material and how to paraphrase.
After completing the tutorial, students should be able to identify an in-text
citation as correct or incorrect.
- I might want to check a paper every once in a while, but I don't
want/need my whole class to sign up for Turnitin.
If you don't have any classes created under your name in the Turnitin
database, you can create a dummy class and assignment name (such as "test")
and upload any student's paper. When you go to submit the paper (from an electronic
file that the student has already given you), you can identify the student
from a dropdown menu as a "non-enrolled student."
Enter a first and last name (or alias) and a title for the submission, then
submit the paper as you normally would. (Just click "submit" next to the name
of the assignment, as if adding an email attachment.
If you don't see the name of your assignment displayed, click on the name
of a class to display its list of assignments, then find the one you want
in the list).
- Should I have students turn in assignments on disk?
If students are uploading their own papers, just log into turnitin.com
and check your "inbox" to view the reports. You might want to have students
print out and bring the "digital receipt" issued by Turnitin to
prove that they have successfully submitted the paper.
Because Turnitin does not allow you to view the paper with its original
formatting, you may want students to also turn in a hard copy of the assignment.
If you are turning in papers for your students, they need to submit electronic
files to you in some form (disk, email attachment, etc). You will already
have this electronic file if your students turn in work through a course-management
system such as WebCT.
- Should we inform students before submitting their papers to Turnitin?
It's better to tell your students. Once they know that they are submitting
work to plagiarism-detection software, Turnitin may have a deterrent effect.
Not all cases of plagiarism are intentional. Using Turnitin is also an
opportunity to teach students about the proper use of secondary sources.
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