Instructions for faculty using Turnitin.com

• Instructor's User Guide [PDF, 5MB]

How it works - a summary

Faculty should contact the Site Administrator, Berkley Laite, for an account ID and password. From this point, faculty members can do everything on their own, including creating classes, submitting papers and accessing reports.

To provide a general idea of the process, here are the basic steps involved in using Shippensburg's account with Turnitin.com. Please keep in mind that many of these steps need only be done one time, when the faculty member first creates an account or class. Subsequently, the login and submission process will go very quickly.

• Go to Turnitin.com and click on New User (if you have already created your account, skip the step below)
• You can provide any username and password you would like to use here when you create your account - it does not have to be connected to your Shippensburg username or passwords, although you can make them the same if it will be easier for you to remember them. Once you have created your profile, click on Submit to get to your "home page." This is where you will be when you log on to the site in the future.
• On your home page, click on Join New Account. Again, you'll only have to do this the first time that you enter the site.
• This is where you'll enter the account ID and password received from the site administrator. Click on Submit.
• Click on the Add Class button to create a class.
• Call the class whatever you'd like. You can make as many classes as you'd like, or just create one and put all submissions in it. You can put as much or as little information on this form as you like.
• Your home page will now have a class listed on it. To enter the class (which you will do in order to submit a paper), click on the class.
• The class will start out empty. First you will need to create an assignment, and then you can submit papers. To get started, click on Assignments, then New assignment on the next page.
• Create your assignment. Again, while each assignment needs a unique number, you can input as much or as little information as you would like.
• Now, from your assignments page, you can click on the submit button and begin to submit papers to Turnitin.com. Once you've hit the submit button, you can input author names or IDs, then paste in text from any electronic document. You can also paste in the abstract and/or the bibliography. Once you've finished, hit the submit button.
• You will now see your assignments page with your submissions. Note the column called R just to the right of the student's name. If that is empty, the plagiairism report is not yet ready. Once you see an icon in that column, you can click on it to view the originality report.
• In order to retrieve reports, log in to Turnitin.com, click on the class that you've created, and click on the assignment that you created. Click on the icon next to the student's name (it usually takes about 24 hours after submission for the report to be prepared) and you'll see the report on your screen. The report is clear and well-marked, with highlighted sections that come from other sources. If you'd like to see the original source and directly compare them, click on DSC for Direct Source Comparison.

Questions?

This is a very brief summary of how faculty can use Shippensburg's account with Turnitin.com. For a full and detailed set of instructions, download or view the entire tutorial from one of the links above.

Options?

Many faculty have used the services of Turnitin.com in a limited fashion, usually by typing in a block of text from a hard copy of a paper that seems suspicious, or perhaps having the student submit an electronic version and copying and pasting part or all of that text. But it is also possible to have all of your students submit electronic copies to you, in case you would like to check a number of papers. In addition, at many schools, faculty have their students submit papers directly to Turnitin.com - as you can see from all of the documentation, this is easily done when you set up a class and create a password for your students. They would not be able to see other submissions or view reports, but they can easily do all of the work required to submit their papers.

How is Turnitin.com different from a simple web search using Google, HotBot, Lycos, Alta Vista, etc.?

Turnitin.com is different in a couple of major areas, but if you would like to do a quick and simple search using any internet search engine, try copying a brief section of text (perhaps 4-6 words) and pasting them in quotes in the search box. The quotation marks will usually force the engine to look for the specific combination of words, giving you a more accurate hit list. Sometimes, in a matter of minutes you can find something amiss on a paper and track down an online source.

But Turnitin.com provides a much more comprehensive reporting and searching mechanism. Online search engines cannot track down material that comes from the huge database of documents and papers (over 100,000!) in Turnitin.com's collection. In addition, the algorithms on which the searching is based can track down much more subtle instances of plagiarism, including these possibilities as described on Plagiarism.org's website: "However, some students may attempt to mislead an instructor by changing words, adding sentences, or reorganizing their papers. . . Less obvious examples occur when a student alters an existing work or integrates it, uncited, into his or her own. Some common examples include the substitution of words or sentences within an already existing work or the cutting and pasting of phrases or entire paragraphs from an outside source into a new document." (For a more complete description of how Turnitin.com works, see the Solutions section from their site.)

For help in getting started with this service, please contact Berk Laite at 477-1473 directly for login information.