
{"id":6176,"date":"2020-02-26T14:00:54","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T14:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/?p=6176"},"modified":"2023-04-25T10:42:48","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T10:42:48","slug":"15-common-misconceptions-about-turnitin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/15-common-misconceptions-about-turnitin\/","title":{"rendered":"15 common misconceptions about Turnitin"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Misconception #1<\/h2>\n<p>Turnitin employs legions of writing experts to read and evaluate papers for plagiarism.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Turnitin receives over 200,000 papers daily, and no human reads the papers at Turnitin. All papers are processed by Turnitin&#8217;s software, servers and databases.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #2<\/h2>\n<p>Turnitin automatically evaluates and grades papers&#8230; eliminating the need for instructors to grade them.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Turnitin matches text similarity and does not grade papers for the instructors. It is up to the instructor and\/or student to determine whether the assignment exhibits plagiarism.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #3<\/h2>\n<p>Turnitin has expertise in plagiarism and can render judgment on specific cases.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: There is no &#8220;threshold&#8221; Similarity Index that is either &#8220;good&#8221; or &#8220;bad&#8221;, each Originality Report needs to be examined to understand what a student did and whether or not there is a problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #4<\/h2>\n<p>Turnitin compares a paper against everything ever written&#8230; web pages, books, publications, unpublished works, etc.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: There are sources that are not in Turnitin, especially if that material is only available in print. But the sources that students typically use are largely included in Turnitin.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #5<\/h2>\n<p>Matched text is likely to be completely coincidental or common knowledge.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: The likelihood that a 16-word match is &#8220;just a coincidence&#8221; is less than 1 in a trillion. Turnitin also includes the ability to exclude &#8220;small matches&#8221; if the instructor wants to exclude common phrases.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #6<\/h2>\n<p>Students can easily &#8220;game&#8221; Turnitin to escape detection.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Once the student receives an Originality Report, they have to wait 24 hours to get another report on a re-submission, preventing students from wordsmithing and re-submitting repeatedly.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #7<\/h2>\n<p>All students hate Turnitin.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Many students have stated that they like the fact that Turnitin helps maintain a level playing field. Turnitin protects students&#8217; work from unauthorised use, and gives students who want to do their own work a good reason not to share their work with others.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #8<\/h2>\n<p>Student copyrights are compromised in some way by Turnitin.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously affirmed that Turnitin&#8217;s archiving of work was not a copyright infringement because it falls within the fair use exception.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #9<\/h2>\n<p>Every student paper submitted becomes part of the Turnitin database forever.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Turnitin has many options, including the ability to offer students an &#8220;opt out&#8221; of the database and the option of having an institutional database of student papers. Student papers may be removed only by request of the instructor of the class.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #10<\/h2>\n<p>The source named in the Originality Report is the exact source used by the writer.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: There can be many matches because of extensive duplications of material on the web. The source named may not be the exact source the student used.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #11<\/h2>\n<p>Papers in the Turnitin database are easily accessible by others so privacy is not protected.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Papers are secure from prying eyes. No one can go into the student database.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #12<\/h2>\n<p>An instructor can determine if a paper is OK or not from the Similarity Index % and doesn&#8217;t need to look at the Originality Report.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: The Similarity Index must be interpreted in the context of the assignment and the actual writing. The only way to do this is to look at the Originality Report.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #13<\/h2>\n<p>The &#8220;Similarity Index&#8221; shows the percentage of paper that is plagiarised.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: The Similarity Index is just a percentage of material in the paper that matches sources in the Turnitin databases. Text that is quoted and cited will be included in the Similarity Index, which offers a great opportunity to check for proper citation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #14<\/h2>\n<p>Turnitin works the same in all situations and is not flexible.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Turnitin has many options and settings for adapting Turnitin to the institution&#8217;s departmental, and individual needs. Instructors can decide to let their students see the reports, do re-submissions, get revised reports or not.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Misconception #15<\/h2>\n<p>Turnitin detects plagiarism.<br \/>\n<strong>Reality: Turnitin matches to text in our databases and leaves the judgment up to the instructor. As mentioned above, instructors <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">MUST<\/span> look at the Originality Reports to determine if there is a problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Misconception #1 Turnitin employs legions of writing experts to read and evaluate papers for plagiarism. Reality: Turnitin receives over 200,000 papers daily, and no human reads the papers at Turnitin. All papers are processed by Turnitin&#8217;s software, servers and databases. Misconception #2 Turnitin automatically evaluates and grades papers&#8230; eliminating the need for instructors to grade [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,25,540],"tags":[40,455,456,197,451,458,457,292],"class_list":["post-6176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advice","category-assessment-feedback","category-moodle","category-turnitin","tag-assignment","tag-misconceptions","tag-myths","tag-online-assessment","tag-online-submission","tag-originality-checking","tag-plagiarism","tag-turnitin"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdVSkC-1BC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6178,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6176\/revisions\/6178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/digital-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}