Turnitin.com
“Turnitin© is the leading Originality Checking and plagiarism prevention service used by millions of students and faculty, and thousands of institutions worldwide. Turnitin encourages best practices for using and citing other people’s written material. The web-based service…manages the process of submitting and tracking papers electronically, providing better—and faster—feedback to students. The instructor sets up a class and the assignment in the Turnitin service. Students then submit their papers to Turnitin via file upload or cut and paste….Turnitin then compares the paper’s text to a vast database of 12+ billion pages of digital content…as well as 100+ million papers in the student paper archive and 80,000+ professional, academic and commercial journals and publications.”
—from http://turnitin.com (FAQs for Students)
Students are provided with a course identification number and a password by their teachers, along with instructions on how to upload their work to Turnitin’s website. The text of the student’s paper is compared to the texts in Turnitin’s database to see if there are any matches. Students can read the report and view the matches in order to make any needed changes to wording or citations before their work is officially submitted for credit. Teachers can also read the report to help them evaluate whether the student’s work has been properly paraphrased or directly quoted and whether the sources have been properly cited. At Preston High School Turnitin is used as a teaching tool to help educate students about plagiarism, paraphrasing and proper citation of sources.
For more information, please see their website at http://turnitin.com/static/company.html
