| Plagiarism and Turnitin.com |
Turnitin Discontinued
e-Learning and Instructional Support will no longer be able to fund Turnitin.com, the anti-plagiarism software, due to the lack of interest. This was discussed and agreed upon by the Senate Academic Computing Committee and the e-LIS Advisory Committee, because only 10 faculty accounts submitted more than 10 papers and the annual license is $8000. Turnitin will be discontinued August 31, 2008.
Faculty can purchase their own individual license for $150 or their department can purchase a license for their departmental enrollment. An alternate method to search for plagiarism is to type a suspected phrase, sentence, or short paragraph into Google. Please contact Cathy Cheal with any questions at cheal@oakland.edu.
Plagiarism is an increasingly complex phenomena in a digital world. The ease of copying and/ or altering text and images from the Internet makes it difficult for faculty to know what exactly is student work and what is copied work. The policy at Oakland University about plagiarism is clear and published in the Undergraduate Catalog, 2003-2004, pp. 70-72 as quoted below:
"Plagiarizing the work of others. Plagiarism is using someone else's work or ideas without giving that person credit; by doing this students are, in effect, claiming information used, they must document the source of information. When dealing with written sources, a clear distinction should be made between quotations (which reproduce information from the source word-for-word within quotation marks) and paraphrases (which digest the source of information and produce it in the student's own words). Both direct quotations and paraphrases must be documented. Even if students rephrase, condense or select from another person's work, the ideas are still the other person's, and failure to give credit constitutes misrepresentation of the student's actual work and plagiarism of another's idea. Buying a paper and handing it in as one's own work is plagiarism."Although, paraphrasing with documentation is difficult to detect, there are a few ways to use software to detect plagiarism that uses direct quotes without crediting the author or entire papers that are the works of another.
- Google One method is to type a suspected phrase, sentence or short paragraph in this Internet search engine. Click on the search button and you will have links to possible matches. Try this out with some copied text from a webpage to see how well it works.
- Turnitin.com Another method is to use Turnitin. After submitting student papers or paragraphs to Turnitin, it will compare the text to both text on the Internet and to other papers stored in its database. Results will tell you the words that resemble other text with side-by-side views.
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