Wait, what is Turnitin you ask?
Turnitin is a web-based application that measures student work to ensure its originality. Turnitin does this by cross-checking student work against a database containing the contents of billions of books, journals, articles, student essays, and discussions. Whenever Turnitin detects too high a degree of similarity in a paper or discussion post, instructors are notified of likely plagiarism.
ACHS has partnered with Turnitin to help improve the quality of student work across the college. While some may think of Turnitin simply as a means of detecting plagiarism, our intention is actually for students and faculty to use it as a tool to elevate the quality of discourse and writing in our courses.
As seen in the image above, Turnitin highlights any portion of a student's submission that appears similar to another source. This is particularly helpful while students are first becoming comfortable learning to cite references.
In order to help students understand and test their work for plagiarism before submitting an assignment, we've created the Turnitin Student Workspace. We encourage you to test your work if you're nervous that your work may not be original enough. We walk you through the process of using Turnitin in the quick video below:
A Few Quick Technical Notes
You can use the Turnitin Student Workspace as much as you like. Whenever you want to test another document, simply add it to the Turnitin Workspace. We highly encourage you to try Turnitin at least once this semester.
Once you do, please let us know how useful you find it. Additionally, don't hesitate to contact us if you need any help. Student Services is here to help, and since you'll soon be submitting more of your major assignments through the Dropbox beginning Winter 2015, we want to ensure you're comfortable doing this.
As mentioned in the video, only specific file types are compatible with Turnitin, so you'll want to ensure you're uploading an appropriate document. Fortunately, most of the big ones are covered:
- Word Documents (.doc, .docx)
- Corel WordPerfect
- Plain Text (.txt)
- Rich Text Format (.rtf)
- Portable Document Format (.pdf)
Unfortunately, Apple Pages documents are not supported. So if you're using Pages be sure to use the 'Export To' option, and save to a compatible format such as .doc, .pdf, or .txt before attaching your file to the Dropbox.
Depending on the version of Pages you might be using, the process might vary, but the screenshot below reflects the latest version of Pages.
