Turnitin is one of the university’s core T&L technologies, enabling students to improve their academic writing and staff to mark assignments and provide feedback online.
I took time recently to attend the annual Turnitin Summit which was themed around academic misconduct, the rise in contract cheating (whereby students contract someone to complete an assignment for them), and how Turnitin is developing its software to combat this malpractice.
If you use Turnitin in your teaching, you may find these key findings of interest.
Academic Misconduct
Turnitin aspires to be a leader in identifying academic misconduct. The company is trying to enhance its reputation for similarity reporting, to identify information sources and help counteract contract cheating. Turnitin can flag assignments as potentially contracted work and students, if appropriate, can be given support to address the reason that led them to engage in such activity. We know students may engage in academic misconduct knowingly and/or unknowingly, and for a number of reasons: lack of understanding of good academic practice, time, bunched assessment deadlines, caring responsibilities, language deficit, pressures at home.
Dr Mary Davis at Oxford Brookes University has led research in to which types of students are most commonly involved in academic misconduct meetings and shared her findings. She discovered the majority were students of certain ethnicities and students who had entered higher education via non-traditional routes. Dr Davis found that whilst 90% of students indicated an awareness of their institutions’ academic misconduct policies, not all of them understood what the policies meant nor where they could access them and the help they needed to develop their own academic integrity. Dr Davis suggests that allowing students to have accessible academic integrity resources in easy-to-find places is a must. Allowing students to help co-create the policies and have some ownership of them would also help. Students listen to other students so incorporating the student voice could also help spread the word about support among students,
“Academic integrity needs to be taught to them [your students], with opportunities to learn. A far better approach than punishing them for getting it wrong.” Dr Mary Davis, Oxford Brookes University
Also discussed was how authentic assessment could help deter contract cheating. It was suggested that having module-specific assessment meaningful in the context of the module (and not meaningful to any would-be ‘contractor’) could help reduce for the opportunity for cheating.
Gradescope
Gradescope, part of the Turnitin suite of tools, enables efficient online marking of scanned handwritten work. This applies mostly to assessments requiring the use of mathematical or scientific notation, but also some modern languages’ assessments. This year, we are inviting use of Gradescope where it would be useful. Please see the Gradescope support page to find out more.
Turnitin – what’s next?
Turnitin is constantly looking to improve its software. Planned developments include:
- Adding similarity reporting functionality to Blackboard assignments;
- Improving the similarity report by adding help resources to enable students to better understand what their similarity score means,
- Adding bubble comment functionality to Gradescope.
Turnitin ultimately aims to provide an interface where you can choose which method of assignment you use for any given assessment, and to support users’ understanding of how to produce original and meaningful assessments which are straightforward to mark and give constructive and meaningful feedback.
Find out more about using Turnitin on the support page.
Full details of the Turnitin Summit can be found on the Turnitin website, where you can also register to view recordings.
Peter Moll (TEL Support Officer, CQSD TEL)