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George Mason University
Turnitin Policies
Overview
George Mason University offers faculty and staff the opportunity to use a service that checks written assignments against several databases and the internet and provides an Originality Report indicating what portion of the assignment can be matched to these sources. While George Mason University has no indication that electronic plagiarism is any more of a problem here than at other educational institutions, numerous surveys, including comprehensive research conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity (http://www.academicintegrity.org/), reveal a high proportion of students (college and high school) who admit to plagiarizing information from the internet. Equally disturbing is the exceedingly high percentage of students who believe that such plagiarism is not a problem.
In an institution that is highly diverse, with many cultures having different perspectives on what it means to represent another person’s work as their own, and many students grappling with English as a second language, it is important that faculty have readily available tools to help quickly clarify common attribution errors, provide useful learning experiences for developing career aspirations, and deter student misuse of electronic resources under deadline and work load pressures.
The University has reviewed our Honor Code policies and processes, and believes that a robust effort to ensure an ethic of integrity in our classes includes in part the effective use of technology to respond to student perceptions and behaviors in their increasingly technological environment.
Use of Turnitin at George Mason University operates under the following strictures:
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George Mason University does not require any faculty or academic unit to use Turnitin; if a faculty member or academic unit decides to require the use of Turnitin as part of a course or a series of courses, they are free to do so.
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George Mason University faculty using Turnitin must clarify their intention to use Turnitin with their students, most appropriately in their syllabus, whether faculty are submitting papers on a case-by-case basis or requiring students to submit assignments online through Turnitin.
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Faculty should be aware that Turnitin will not detect all instances of plagiarism, and should properly contextualize the use of Turnitin among other strategies for preventing and detecting plagiarism.
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George Mason University strongly encourages faculty to use Turnitin to help students learn effective citation practices, and to differentiate between poor citation practices and more explicit and intentional efforts by students to submit work that is not their own.
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Turnitin users should never rely simply on the face value of a high matching score in the Originality Report. While Turnitin can rapidly detect matching material, faculty analysis and interpretation is critical to making a judgment about the occurrence of plagiarism. This is particularly important to note since by default the Originality Report includes matching material that is inside quotation marks and is in the bibliography.
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Student privacy is a preeminent concern, particularly as it relates to federal law. Turnitin reports matches made to a database of previously submitted papers, but will only identify the faculty member and educational institution of the previous submission. Any faculty receiving queries from other faculty, administrators, or educational institutions about submitted papers should defer all communication to the Provost’s Office, and should most definitely not release personal student information.
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Faculty concerned about student intellectual property, which may or may not be implicated by Turnitin’s derivative algorithm for each submitted paper stored in their database, may elect not to have student papers submitted to Turnitin’s student paper database. This option can be deselected in the assignment creation dialog box under Show Advanced Options.
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Finally, faculty using Turnitin should consider the value of this tool for providing a learning experience, and are urged to provide additional learning resources for clarifying proper source attribution practices, and to seriously consider allowing students to view their own Originality Reports. Faculty can set this option in the course creation and assignment creation dialog boxes (under Show Advanced Options), but as with the use of Turnitin itself, faculty and academic units have the freedom to decide whether or not students may see their Originality Report.
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