Mark Pannell

OK, so you’re using Turnitin with a group of students, great. However, those students could be using the Turnitin route through their e-Portfolio (PebblePad). What happens if they check their work independently via Turnitin before submitting it to your assignement?

Unfortunately the Turnitin check through e-Portfolio submits a copy of their work to the Turnitin database and if the work is then checked after submission to your assignement against the Turnitin database a match will be found. Ouch.

So what can you do?

1. Not check your students work against the Turnitin database – blunt instrument option.

2. When a match to one student at Plymouth is found assume that match is because a student has checked their own work before submitting to your course. Use the Turnitin Originality Report features to turn off that match and view any underlying matches. There is more information about how to do this on page 53 of the Full Instructor Manual.

3. Ask students to submit copies of any previous reports they have generated to you so that you know it was them submitting.

Of course it’s also important to clarify with students that this may happen if you are allowing them to see originality reports for submissions to your assignment. They will also need to know they can ignore matches when viewing the originality reports.

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

Free help and advice to the UK Further and Higher Education community – just what we need, so timely! Video, audio, still images, cross-media – the site has so much helpful advice, case studies, tutorials, etc, plus a Helpdesk if you can’t find the answer you’re looking for. Cheers JISC, I can already see you’ve saved me a lot of work.

I was clearing a backlog of emails and I just wanted to keep this article fresh in my mind, and somewhere I could find it quickly but thought it might interest others so here it is.

Students ‘let down’ by the academic Luddites – THES 12/08/2010

Thanks Becky for bringing it to my attention