Turnitin is an online plagiarism prevention system meant to help faculty and students detect and avoid plagiarism in their academic work.

What It Does

Turnitin compares the text of any paper submitted against three possible sources:

Publicly accessible web pages, including online PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents
Any papers previously submitted to Turnitin (currently over 1 million)
Full text of articles appearing in ProQuest database

What you get back is an "originality report" linking to the sources where matches were found.

For Faculty

General Guidelines and Tips

Resources:
Using Turnitin at Dowling
ID and password for joining
Turnitin Instructor User Guide
From Turnitin
Plagiarism Detection
General outline and helpful links
Access Turnitin

1. Create a User Profile as an Instructor

Use Dowling's account ID and password to join the account.
If you ever forget your password, use the password help link off of Turnitin.com.
For any additional questions or problems, contact Chris Kretz, account administrator.

2. Create A Class

Use the add a class link to create a new class.
Each class you create will have it's own ID number (generated automatically) and password (you create - and it's case sensitive). You must give this information to your students in order for them to "join" your class and submit their papers.
By default, students cannot view their originality reports.
A class lasts six months before it goes inactive. You can still view it, but you can't submit papers. You can opt for a longer class time or reactivate an inactive class at a later date.

3. Create An Assignment

Set deadlines for submissions, including whether or not to accept late work.
Assignment types: you can create a revision assignment which will let students resubmit a new draft of any previous assignment.

4. Quick Submit

Quick Submit lets you bypass the class/assignment route if you only have one or two papers that you want to submit yourself.
You must first activate Quick Submit under your User Info section.
You must have the paper in electronic form either on a disk or on your hard drive.

5. Originality Reports

You can save or e-mail originality reports.
Turnitin gives you the option to exclude material within quotation marks and items listed in a bibliography.

6. Other

Make sure that your students are aware that you are using Turnitin. It is recommended that you include it in your syllabus.
Turnitin will alert you to sources that contain a degree of matching text. The final determination of whether or not plagiarism has occurred is up to the instructor.

General Guidelines and Tips

Resources:
Turnitin Student User Guide
From Turnitin
Avoiding Plagiarism
General outline and helpful links
Dowling College Student Handbook
Academic Honesty starts on page 21
Access Turnitin

1. Create a User Profile as a Student

You will need to enter a valid email address and create your own password.
If you ever forget your password, use the password help link on Turnitin to reset it.

2. Enroll in a class

The first time you use Turnitin, you will be asked to enter the class ID and password when you set up your profile.
For additional classes, click on enroll in a class and enter the class ID and password given to you by your instructor.

3. Submitting Papers

You must have your paper in an electronic format and be on a computer connected to the internet.
Turnitin accepts Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, plain text, and HTML documents.
You will be emailed a digital receipt as final confirmation after submitting a paper.