Good images, effective messages? Working with students and educators on academic practice understanding

Work at Northumbria University has focussed on activity that extends opportunities for students to engage directly with the skills development necessary for sound academic practice. This has included highly visual campaigns on the "Plagiarism trap", providing access to Turnitin plagiarism detection software, guides and sessions to highlight use of associated referencing tools. Sessions on a variety of topics, such as supporting study skills and reading originality reports, have been provided for students on taught, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This provision has included students working on collaborative partners' sites and also those on research programmes. Alongside the activities with students, "designing out" approaches have been embedded in staff development within the educator community at Northumbria. Formative use of Turnitin is integrated throughout programmes and academic practice development is formally recognised within the University Learning and Teaching Strategy's focus on information literacy. This article outlines and reviews these activities in a critical institutional context and evaluates responses from a variety of students and educators to determine how effective these measures have been

Optimising and automating the choice of search strings when investigating possible plagiarism

This paper describes how to optimise the use of Internet search engines when investigating a document for possible non-original content. Services such as Turnitin do not guarantee to identify all non-original content, leading tutors to have to conduct manual searches when suspicion of non-originality remains. Previous studies have suggested that the investigator should manually select memorable phrases from the paper and submit them to a general search engine. The studies in this paper demonstrate that selecting phrases at random is just as effective. Several corpora of documents were obtained from a number of different academic areas, and several phrases were obtained from each. Strings, of increasing length starting with a single word, from these phrases were submitted to specialised and general search engines and the number of hits recorded. A common finding of these searches was that, in almost all cases, strings of six words were sufficiently distinct to uniquely identify the document that the string was taken from. One consequence of this is that totally automated tools are possible for this search-engine based non-originality detection technique

TURNITIN WASHBACK EFFECT: EFL STUDENTS’ METHODS OF AVOIDING PLAGIARISM ON ACADEMIC WRITING

Academic dishonesty is a major issue in the current educational problem, especially in academic writing. One of the most crucial practices of academic dishonesty is plagiarism. In order to prevent it, many universities worldwide use Turnitin as one of the plagiarism detection software for the solution to fighting plagiarism. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the methods used by English as Foreign Language (EFL) students in avoiding plagiarism on their academic writing. A case study at a university in Indonesia was conducted. Six postgraduate students of English Education major were chosen as the participants to be interviewed regarding the utilization of Turnitin. From the students’ responses, in avoiding plagiarism, they get the idea to write from observing their surroundings, following their passion and reading a lot. Moreover, in the process of writing academically from sources, they also employ patchwriting, citing the sources correctly, self-reading, re-checking the sources, checking to other plagiarism detection software and learning about Turnitin. However, in order to decrease the similarity percentage of their papers, they were also deleting the similar-detected part and even changed the paper. Therefore, it is recommended for the students, teachers, and institutions to concern more on how to write from sources as the part of learning to write rather than rely too much on the originality report from Turnitin

A Cautionary Note on Checking Software Engineering Papers for Plagiarism

© 2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. 1 Several tools are marketed to the educational community for plagiarism detection and prevention. This article briefly contrasts the performance of two leading tools, TurnItIn and MyDropBox, in detecting submissions that were obviously plagiarized from articles published in IEEE journals. Both tools performed poorly because they do not compare submitted writings to publications in the IEEE database. Moreover, these tools do not cover the ACM database or several others important for scholarly work in software engineering. Reports from these tools suggesting that a submission has “passed ” can encourage false confidence in the integrity of a submitted writing. Additionally, students can submit drafts to determine the extent to which these tools detect plagiarism in their work. Because the tool samples the engineering professional literature narrowly, the student who chooses to plagiarize can use this tool to determine what plagiarism will be invisible to the faculty member. An appearance of successful plagiarism prevention may in fact reflect better training of students to avoid plagiarism detection. Index Terms – copyright, academic honesty, plagiarism, plagiarism detection, intellectual property, editorial manuscript review, TurnItIn, MyDropbox I

Academic Ethics Conflict in the Age of Wikipedia and Turnitin.com: A Study Assessing the Opinions of Exiting College Students

Technology has wrought paradigmatic shifts in societal, institutional, and individual power to instantly share and collaboratively produce knowledge, influencing the definition and perceived significance of academic ethics (AE), a continually evolving social construct. Student disregard of AE can generate wide-ranging conflicts affecting multiple student-success stakeholders: students, their families, instructors, administrators, schools, employers of graduates, and society. Dominant AE higher education institutional strategies typically position the individual student as the problem, leaving contextual influences on their academic conduct outside the AE conflict resolution discourse. The researcher conducted an exploratory research study to ascertain undergraduate students\u27 opinions about AE at a university poised to coordinate and consolidate policy for its undergraduate student population--Nova Southeastern University (NSU). NSU recently announced the creation of a new College of Undergraduate Studies (CUS) to establish a single and unified undergraduate identity throughout its six undergraduate degree-conferring schools. Data was collected and analyzed to assess the opinions of exiting NSU undergraduate students\u27: 1) beliefs about AE, 2) familiarity with school policies and rules, 3) perceived AE experience at NSU, and 4) awareness of conflicts generated by disregard of AE standards and objectives. Conflicts resulting from disparate understandings of academic ethics between students, faculty, and administrators can be reduced and prevented through enhanced communication. This study\u27s findings provided a repository of knowledge to inform NSU/CUS institutional AE strategies by giving voice to students, thereby enhancing communication and the conflict resolution potential of institutional initiatives for the benefit of students and student-success stakeholders at NSU and all similarly-structured universities