Product Overview of Turnitin
Turnitin is a comprehensive educational tool designed to ensure academic integrity, improve learning outcomes, and streamline the assessment and grading process for educators and students across various educational levels, including secondary and postsecondary institutions.
What Turnitin Does
Turnitin is primarily a plagiarism detection and deterrent application that scans student submissions against a vast database to identify matched text. This database includes billions of web pages, archived content, a repository of previously submitted student work, and a collection of documents from thousands of periodicals, journals, and publications.
Key Features and Functionality
Similarity Report
One of the core features of Turnitin is the Similarity Report, which compares the text of a student’s submission to the vast database of content. This report quantifies the similarity between the submitted work and existing sources, providing a percentage score that indicates the level of matching content. The report details any matching or highly similar text, along with information about the matching source, helping instructors to identify potential plagiarism.
Advanced Matching Techniques
Turnitin employs natural language processing and strict matching techniques to minimize false positives and ensure accuracy. Users can configure advanced settings to refine the similarity score, making the report more tailored to the specific needs of each assignment.
Addressing Emerging Trends in Misconduct
Turnitin is equipped to detect various forms of plagiarism, including text similarity, synonym swapping, contract cheating, AI writing, and AI paraphrasing. This ensures that educators can address both traditional and emerging forms of academic misconduct.
Grading and Assessment Tools
Turnitin offers tools to streamline grading and assessment processes. Instructors can build, administer, and grade paper-based, bubble sheet, digital, and code assignments, whether in-person, online, or in a hybrid setting. The platform also supports the use of rubrics, peer review (PeerMark), and quick feedback (QuickMarks) through the Turnitin Feedback Studio.
Digital Exam Experience
Turnitin provides a secure and reliable digital exam experience, allowing institutions to prepare students for their careers and meet accreditation requirements. This feature is particularly useful for exams, licenses, or certifications.
Academic Integrity and Workflow Integration
The platform integrates academic integrity into the educational workflow, helping institutions maintain their reputation through high-quality, comprehensive similarity detection. It also serves as a learning tool to guide students on how to properly reference and cite sources, promoting original thought and academic integrity.
Publishing with Confidence
For academic researchers and publishers, Turnitin offers a trusted tool to check for similarity, ensuring that published work is original and free from plagiarism.
Additional Benefits
- Compliance and Privacy: Turnitin is compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), ensuring that student data is handled in accordance with educational privacy laws.
- User Support: The platform offers various resources, including live training sessions, guides for instructors and students, and consultation services to help users get the most out of the tool.
In summary, Turnitin is a robust educational tool that not only detects plagiarism but also provides a suite of features to enhance learning outcomes, streamline grading, and ensure academic integrity at all levels of education.