Using Turnitin at UCLA

Jack Bishop, Ph.D.
UCLA, Office of Instructional Development
December 2006

Technologically-assisted academic dishonesty has rightfully attracted much attention among educators over the past decade as new technologies emerge that enable students to “get over” by using them to short-cut the effort normally associated with passing courses. Technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, programmable calculators, pagers and Ipods are luring students away from often arduous academic work and toward the “easy path” to success. One of the most serious problems is student plagiarism on term papers. Plagarism detection was the impetus behind the creation of Turnitin.com, just one of the many technologies designed to counteract this phenomenon. Turnitin was designed as a brake against the rising incidents of technologically-enhanced academic dishonesty such as buying papers outright on “cheat sites,” “essay mills,” copying and pasting the majority of a paper’s content from online sources, or simply re-using papers previously submitted (either by themselves or by other students). Without the aid of an electronic database with which professors could compare papers, challenging the originality of a paper could be a very difficult endeavor. Below, I first present an overview of using Turnitin.com, and then I present an argument that examines the implications of using such a system.

During the fall quarters at UCLA, I instruct a lower division course in the Department of Ethnomusicology called “Global Pop.” The course draws between 80 and 90 students. In the previous fall quarter I assigned a rather lengthy research paper and at the end of the quarter I sat down to read all of them one by one. Receiving eighty 16-20 page papers meant that I had the pleasure of reading through 1,200-1,600 pages, and making corrections, before I could turn in the grades. Now, I love to read student papers, but as I read, I felt the eerie feeling that I had previously read some of the ideas elsewhere. As an ethnomusicologist, I have read an incredible amount of writings about music, and although the exact original sources may have escaped me, I knew I had read similar words elsewhere. Since my students were not music majors, and in many cases my course was the first music course they had taken, the sophistication of the analyses seemed disjointed from the sources. But, alas, not having utilized the Turnitin feature on the MyUCLA website, checking the originality of the papers became a very daunting task. During the current fall session, learning from my mistake, and having assigned a paper based upon internet research, I decided to give Turnitin a try.

 Next: Part One - What Turnitin Does

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