Academic Integrity and Turnitin

Colleges and Universities today are struggling with helping their students understand the importance of academic integrity. In some places this has become an unfortunate “us” vs. “them” game in which professors seem to suspect every student of being ready to plagiarize if they can only be sure of getting away with it.

The College of Education hopes, instead, to help its students learn the importance of academic integrity and the ways in which students might inadvertently make mistakes that violate this important idea. To that end we have provided links to resources at the left and we are also providing software called Turnitin that will allow students to submit and check their written projects for possible problems with plagiarism.

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin allows faculty and students to check written work against a large database of academic materials for originality. Turnitin also checks written work against content that can be found on the internet. Assignments that are checked will generate an Originality Report that will summarize matches or near-matches in the text.

The database includes and looks for matches in over 13.5 billion pages of web content, over 130 million papers in the student paper archive, and over 80,000 professional, academic, and commercial journals, and publications. New content is being continually added.

This tool allows students to recognize when their work may raise concerns about plagiarism and allows them to properly edit and cite work that may be heavily quoted, paraphrased, or improperly sourced.