Interpreting Turnitin Reports

January 8, 2010 by Norrie Brown Comments (2)

Hi Bloggers

Just come from a session on interpreting Turnitin reports by Dr Claire Garden (SLS). Very interesting presentation and discussion on the issues of how to introduce Turnitin and the issues related to how people make sense of theTurnitin outputs. Main issues seem to be around:

students and staff intrerpret reports simplistically
ensuring that staff see it as an active process where they need to use their own common sense when they are interpreting reports and not to be passive recipients of Turnitin as this is only a tool but the decision on plagiarism is a judgement that lecturers make
students who don't pick up their assignments won't look at thei Turnitin reports
in the early stages, students need help and support to practise paraphrasing, referencing and with the conventions surrounding sources and the use of quotations
be clear abouit the aim of using this tool and don't try to do too much too soon
in order to help staff and students to understand Turnitin reports she has developed a checklist which can be used to help them get an understanding of what the report means

David Jarman

I've been using Turnitin across all my UK modules for a couple of years now and have found it a beneficial piece of software. I make the point to the students on every module that they're human beings submitting the work, and I'm a human being looking at the results - this is, as you say, a tool.

On bigger modules it can become difficult to check that everyone has submitted to Turnitin, but maybe this is down to me not using it appropriately, or missing a trick somewhere.

And anyone using this for group work needs to make the point that only one student should submit the work, otherwise there'll be duplicates causing all sorts of fun at the end of the day! (Although you can of course choose to exclude specific sources when asking the software to look for matches.)

David Jarman 244 days ago

Janis Greig

I only use Turnitin in my "policing" role as an academic conduct officer but am aware of colleagues' educational use with formative changes before final submission. I don't think Turnitin is a panacea and similarity index reports needs careful and experienced interpretation. I agree that staff and students often adopt an overly simplistic approach - above this number of similarity bad, below this level of similarity good and it's not like that. I have recently had 3 cases of plagiarism which Turnitin did not pick up/include in the report despite definite copy-pasting from e-journals. I would value a look at the checklist created by Clare and will ask her about it again.

Janis Greig 136 days ago