Periodic Fable

Misconception 1:  Turnitin compares a paper against everything ever written . . . web pages, books, publications, unpublished works, etc . . .
Reality: There are sources that are not in Turnitin–especially if that material is only available in print, or is in a very specialist journal. However Turnitin state that the sources that students typically use are largely included in Turnitin.

Misconception 2:  Students can easily cheat Turnitin to escape detection.
Reality: Once the student receives an Originality Report, they have to wait 24 hours to get another report on a re-submission, preventing students from making small changes to words and phrases and re-submitting repeatedly.

Misconception 3:  Students should be encouraged to redraft and resubmit until they get a designated Similarity low score. This will prevent plagiarism.
Reality: This proves only that they can fiddle with words and phrases to “pass” Turnitin. Similarity scores are not a measure of plagiarism.  Far better is to encourage student to be original from the start in writing their paper. Turnitin is specifically designed to stop “wordsmithing” and repeated resubmission.

Misconception 4:  A lecturer can determine if a paper is OK or not from the Similarity Index % and doesn’t need to look at the Originality Report.
Reality: The Similarity Index must be interpreted in the context of the assignment and the actual writing. The only way to do this is to look at the Originality Report.

Misconception 5:  The “Similarity Index” shows the percentage of paper that is plagiarized.?
Reality: The Similarity Index is just a percentage of material in the paper that matches sources in the Turnitin databases.  Text that is quoted and cited will be included in the Similarity Index, which can be used as an opportunity to check that students have used proper citation. The percentage that flags up potential plagiarism  for a lecturer will vary depending on the type of assignment.  An essay subject that has frequently been given before with only a limited number of possible sources may for example match many phrases because there aren’t original ways to say what has been said so often before!  Or a lab report following a model format may include a lot of terminology and forms of wording that cause small matches.

And the big one:

Misconception 6:  Turnitin detects plagiarism.?
Reality: Turnitin matches to text in its databases and leaves the judgment up to the lecturer.  It is absolutely essential that lecturers look at the Originality Reports to determine if there is a problem .

This is an edited re-post of my original blog post at the University of Nottingham Talking of Teaching blog and inspired by “The top 15 misconceptions about Turnitin”, published on the Turnitin blog, and thinking about questions from colleagues and students.