Problem with change in TurnItIn design
I'm a high school English teacher, and I've been a regular user of TurnItIn for years. I've been happy with the site and relied on it to check my students' work for plagiarism (and, more recently, plagiarism via AI). However, the recent change in the system of submitting work has made it much more difficult for me to use TurnItIn. Now, I am required to register students--with their email addresses--in the course before submitting their work. That is an untenable situation for me, because I do not want my students to know we are using TurnItIn to check their work. If students know which plagiarism checker we are using, it becomes much easier for them to cheat the system. (Try Googling "how to cheat TurnItIn"--it's very easy to do.) I need to be able to enter their work in TurnItIn without the students' knowledge, and the new system has made it virtually impossible for me to do that. I'm wondering if others have figured out a way around this new obstacle. I'd hate to have to abandon TurnItIn and use Google Classroom or another plagiarism checker instead.
4 replies
-
Julia Fisher I completely understand your frustration. The decision to remove this functionality was not taken lightly and was done for very sound reasons. One of the benefits of this approach obviously promotes formative use of Turnitin. However I understand your reservations about students gaming the system and I would encourage you to take a look at our Disrupting Plagiarism pack which considers instructional approaches to using our tool and developing a culture of academic integrity.
-
Hi Gill--thanks for your response. I would love to speak to someone from TurnItIn about the change. I tried reaching out to customer support but haven't heard from anyone. If someone could email me at jfisher@gds.org or call me at 202 415 5599, I'd very much appreciate that; I'm not sure it makes the most sense to have this discussion in a public forum, but I couldn't find a phone number to call and wanted to see if other TurnItIn users perhaps had good ways to work around the change.
I must say that submitting students' email addresses is a nonstarter for me and my department, for several reasons, including protecting the privacy of students' addresses; we also have deep pedagogical concerns. My inference is that you've decided that you want students, not teachers, to be the ones using TurnItIn's system, as if to check their own work to make sure that it is not plagiarized, but we think that to be a very wrong-headed approach to preventing plagiarism and teaching students not to plagiarize; it suggests to students that they can merely game a program or use it as a safeguard rather than making sure, proactively, that they do not put themselves in danger of plagiarizing and that they truly understand what plagiarism is. (Keep in mind that unattributed paraphrases of others' work, which TurnItIn does not catch, are also plagiarism.) More to the point, I find it troubling that TurnItIn would force a pedagogical decision rather than letting teachers decide how best to use the software in their own classes.
And still more to the point, my department paid for our subscription to TurnItIn assuming we would be able to use it as we always have, and now we've found that that is no longer possible. The rug has been pulled out from under us, which is quite disturbing. Needless to say, I'd love to talk directly to someone who can help me with this problem. -
Have you tried the Quick Submit feature? That is what I use to get around the registering kids.