General Procedure for Use

Creating an Account

Faculty use the unit Account ID and Join Password, browse to www.turnitin.com, follow the top right link for “New Users” to create an account using their Mason e-mail address. After creating their own account (setting a password and establishing a “secret question”), faculty will thereafter log on to Turnitin with this password.

Setting up a Course Account

Faculty then set up a course account for each of their classes and create assignments, both of which require a start and end date. No submissions are possible without a created assignment. If faculty simply want to submit specific questionable papers and don't want students to submit papers online, then go to a specific course and assignment, click "Submit," input name and title information, and upload the paper for an Originality Report. Submissions can be in PDF, Word, WordPerfect, Text, HTML format, or a cut-and-paste option.

Submitting an Assignment

If faculty want students to submit an assignment online, then note carefully when creating a course the Course ID (the number generated by Turnitin and listed to the left of the course title) and the Join Password (that faculty set when they create a course) to convey to students for online submissions. While faculty can import and add students to a course, having students follow the New User link, enter the Course ID and Join Password, and submit materials online makes the process much more manageable.

For students to see their own originality report, the bottom drop-down box of the course creation dialog box must be set to YES. Faculty must also specify this option when creating an assignment. Setting the bottom drop-down box on “Show advanced assignment options” to YES (wait a moment for the screen refresh) allows faculty to decide if students can see their own originality reports immediately, if they can submit more than once, and which databases they will allow for the paper comparison.

Submissions result in relatively rapid (< 5 minutes usually) receipt of Originality Reports. When looking at a class, click on “Inbox” for a specific assignment to see submissions, and then click on the colored % for submitted papers to see the side-by-side Originality Report. The left side is the submitted paper (the right side is initially the list of relevant web links), clicking on colored text on the left side brings up the matching text on the actual web site on the right for a close inspection.

IMPORTANT! By default, Originality Reports show matching text EVEN IF IT IS QUOTED PROPERLY OR IS PART OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY. To get a more accurate originality score, select the links above the paper text (“Exclude Quoted” and “Exclude Bibliography”), and the Originality Report will be revised to reveal matches not in quotes and not in the bibliography. Instructor judgment and evaluation is still critical to a determination of plagiarism.

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