What Else Does It Do?

As mentioned, aside from their plagiarism check function, Turnitin.com offers a host of other tools, that, when used properly can significantly enhance student learning and help build a sense of community among students, especially in larger classes. However, due to the licensing agreement, these services are currently unavailable to the UCLA community. Below, I offer a brief overview of these functions and their usefulness.  

Peer Review is another feature of the Turnitin service by which the instructor can create assignments that incorporate a collaborative learning environment through which students “are encouraged to evaluate the writing decisions made by others” which allows students to “develop the critical thinking and editorial skills that translate into increased effectiveness in their own writing”  (Turnitin.com 2006a). Additionally, having the students edit one another’s papers lends an air of openness and community to the course, which can promote real-life friendships.

GradeMark is Turnitin’s Digital Markup Solution for correcting and making revision suggestions to students’ papers. Unlike the current method of marking comments directly on the student’s paper with a pen, GradeMark allows the instructor to make comments of any length at any point in the paper. “Gone are the days of scrawled red ink in tiny margins, arrows leading to notes on other pages, and incomprehensible typographical marks” (Turnitin.com 2006b). By creating “rubrics” Turnitin categorizes and stores the comments for the instructor to use on other papers. For example, if the instructor creates a rubric for “Incomplete sentence, please revise,” every time the instructor encounters such a problem in other papers the instructor can apply the rubric rather than re-type the comments. After organizing the rubrics, the time spent correcting papers is reduced dramatically. Once the instructor has marked up the paper, the student can then see the comments on the Turnitin web site. They can then retrieve the paper make the corrections and resubmit it for final grading. GradeMark is a paperless grading system that, aside from providing increased efficiency and flexibility, the instructor is able to identify problems that might be common to the entire class, allowing future lessons to be tailored toward the elimination of such problems.

GradeBook is Turnitin’s new online grading system. Although this service is unavailable to the UCLA community, I will provide a very brief overview of its functions. Any assignments completed through Turnitin such as peer reviews or submitting essays are automatically entered in the Turnitin GradeBook. The GradeBook can also serve as a convenient place to keep track of student absences and tardiness. GradeBook is entirely customizable to fit any existing grading format and it is easy to adjust base percentage values to match those used in the instructor’s institution. Differently weighted assignments are no problem. Additionally, GradeBook can display result graphs for a quick view of class progress and can be downloaded in an Excel spreadsheet for archiving or administrative purposes. Overall, the usefulness of GradeBook to UCLA instructors is questionable since the Registrar requires grades be submitted through the Gradebook on the instructor’s MyUCLA web page. The entire suite of Turnitin tools integrates seamlessly with the class the management systems Blackboard, WebCT, Angel and Moodle.

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