Turn It In

Turn It In (turnitin.com) is a website that students and teachers can use to submit work and view submitted work, respectively. Turn It In is a great tool to ensure academic honesty.

In the assignment this week we were instructed to copy and paste information directly from a website and then submit it on turnitin.com. After submission the site scans to see if any work is plagiarized. Turn It In will give you a percentage and it's kind of like Golf; the lower the better. Since we copied and pasted my plagiarism score came back at 98%. For the second part of the assignment we were to summarize and paraphrase the same content we orginally copied and pasted and compare it to our new summarised report score. Mine came back at 2%. The acceptable percentage was set by the teacher at 20%. So at 2%, that's well within the acceptable level, so I left my report the way it was.

It's an amazing tool for students because students will get a report back that shows them how much of their work is plagiarized and what parts they need to change or reword. Even if the plagiarism score is not 0% it doesn't necessarily mean you will get a failing grade and be penalized for plagiarizing. Most teachers set their acceptable plagiarism percentage around 20%. For the teachers it's an extremely useful tool because Turn It In informs them when students work is being plagiarized. Teachers have the capability to go in and change the acceptable percentage for each assignment, then once the assignments are in they can choose to ignore certain plagiarism marks if they don't feel that it's really a problem. For example, say I quoted something from CNN.com and even though I included quotation marks and a parenthetical citiation, I still gor marks for plagiarizing. Well, the teacher, when grading, can choose to ignore certain marks.