In an effort to ensure the highest academic standards, Durham College faculty have requested the use of a plagiarism detection service on campus. The college has purchased a license with Turnitin.com, an online plagiarism detection service.
Please note, faculty members are not required to use Turnitin.com.
According to the Durham College Turnitin.com guidelines approved by Academic Council, only faculty members can submit student papers to Turnitin.com. Those papers are checked for matching text, a report is generated and it is returned to the instructor. Papers submitted to Turnitin are compared against billions of internet documents, an archived copy of the internet, its local databases of submitted student papers, and the ProQuest commercial database. Any matching text that is found is detailed in an Originality Report sent to the instructor's assignment inbox.
Although Originality Reports can be very effective at helping to identify suspected individual cases of plagiarism, Turnitin plagiarism prevention works even more powerfully when used as a deterrent. Students who know that their work could come under effective scrutiny are much more likely to produce original work.
Any work submitted to Turnitin must be scrutinized carefully by the instructor. Turnitin is actually a text-matching process and can result in text matches that may not actually be plagiarized. For example, the phrase, "the purpose of this paper is to determine…" might be returned as a plagiarized phrase, when in fact, it is a commonly used phrase.
It should be noted that Turnitin does not compare against books, but only those resources found on the internet. As well, if professors have given assignments that are similar or numerical, Turnitin may not be of value.
Before using the Turnitin.com service, students must be informed. Faculty members are to insert the information paragraph into the course outline.
DURHAM COLLEGEis committed to the fundamental values of preserving academic integrity as defined in DURHAM COLLEGE policies and contained in the DURHAM COLLEGE Student Handboook. DURHAM COLLEGE and faculty members reserve the right to use electronic means to detect and help prevent plagiarism. Students agree that by taking this course all assignments are subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com. Assignments submitted to Turnitin.com will be included as source documents in Turnitin.com's restricted access database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism in such documents for five academic years. The faculty member may require students to submit their assignments electronically to Turnitin.com or the faculty member may submit questionable text on behalf of a student. The terms that apply to DURHAM COLLEGE's use of the Turnitin.com service are described on the Turnitin.com Web site.
If students object to having their papers submitted to Turnitin.com, they are to complete the Assignment Cover Sheet (refer to the appendices) and submit it in with the assignment. Students are then to meet with the faculty member to discuss how authenticity of their papers can be established. The Turnitin.com system is simple to use and can accommodate hundreds of papers at one time. For training in Turnitin.com, please contact the Innovation Centre.