The Turnitin.com service for detecting plagiarism in English prose has been used effectively at UCI for quite a few years; it checks submissions against Internet sources and against other submissions (so that if you use the service in successive quarters, students who "recycle" others' work from previous quarters will be identified).

The rest of this document is of mainly historical value; aside from this paragraph, it was last modified in 2010. More current information should be available at EEE: https://eee.uci.edu/help/turnitin/ .

This document describes how to use Turnitin.com in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. Instructors from other units at UCI should contact their own units' coordinators; for help with this, contact Steve Franklin (franklin@uci.edu), the campus coordinator for Turnitin.com.

The campus has a contract with Turnitin that allows unlimited use by any class on campus. Instructors now interact with Turnitin.com themselves; back when there was money, we had a grad student who could help coordinate this.

There are four steps to using Turnitin.com:

• Register yourself and your course with Turnitin.com


• Give students notice that Turnitin.com will be used, as mandated by UCI's agreement with Turnitin.com


• If you want to check a single student's work, submit it to Turnitin.com yourself. To check all your students' assignments, you may instruct your students to submit their own assignments directly to Turnitin.com (which is both inconvenient and subject to subterfuge—a student might submit one version to you for grading and a different version to Turnitin.com for plagiarism checking). You may also have students submit their work via Checkmate (checkmate.ics.uci.edu) or the EEE DropBox and then write a shell script to manage the batch submission to Turnitin.com.


• Review the Turnitin.com similarity report(s)

Each step is described below.

Register yourself and your course with Turnitin.com

• First, send David Kay a message (kay@ics.uci.edu); he'll send you the ICS account ID and password you'll need to register.


• Go to www.turnitin.com and click "Create a User Profile." This launches a series of registration screens. [Note that Turnitin.com's user interface is notorious for changing frequently.]


• In step 1, enter your UCInet ID (your Email address @uci.edu) where it asks for an Email address.


• In step 2, enter a password (which is between you and Turnitin.com; it need not be your UCInet ID password).


• In step 3, enter your name, "US", and "California".


• In step 4, enter "instructor".


• In step 5, read the agreement and click "Agree".


• Then click to start the class setup process.


• In step 1, enter the ICS account and password you received from David Kay.


• In step 2, enter the name of your course, following the format of these examples: "Spring 2004 ICS 131: Social Analysis of Computerization" or "Summer 10-week 2004 ICS 139W: Communications Skills for Computer Scientists"


• In step 3, make a note of the class ID number you've been assigned. Choose a "class enrollment password."


• Step 4 asks you to specify a name and due date for your first assignment. The due date tells us when it's safe to start uploading assignments. You can modify and add assignment information later.


• After you receive confirmation of the previous step, go back to www.turnitin.com and log in with the Email address and password you specified. This will show you your course.

Give students notice that Turnitin.com will be used

UCI's agreement with Turnitin.com requires that students be notified about some aspects of the system's use.

The best way to achieve this is to ask students to sign the following statement. If you typically give students a questionnaire that collects demographic information, you could include this text at the bottom, perhaps introduced with some softening language (e.g., " We apologize for this fine print, but the University wants us to be perfectly clear about a couple of things. Please read this carefully and sign it.").

I understand and agree that to protect the value of the independent work that I do in this course, the work of all students in the course may be compared for textual analysis and evidence of plagiarism to the work of other students, both in this course and in others, and to other sources on the Internet and elsewhere. This may involve the storage of students' work on computer systems outside of the university, such as the Turnitin.com reference database; this storage is solely for purposes of detecting plagiarism. Use of the Turnitin.com service is subject to the usage policy agreement posted on the Turnitin.com site. Students who wish an offline alternative to Turnitin.com should check with their instructor; typical offline alternatives include providing a full annotated bibliography and copies of all cited works with each submitted assignment. I promise to follow all the university, departmental, and course policies about academic honesty.

Signature: _______________________________ Date: ____________

The requirement for providing an offline alternative probably comes from courses where students write about very personal and potentially embarrassing topics. In computer science classes, this presumably should not be an issue. The alternatives are meant to be burdensome enough to dissuade students from requesting them and thorough enough to demonstrate with confidence that a student who does use them will have done his or her own work.

It would be reasonable to allow students to return this signed statement at the next class meeting, so those few who actually wish to read the various policies have an opportunity to do so before signing. Have a TA check the returned statements off against the class roster and keep after straggling students. You could also reproduce this information on your syllabus, so students continue to have access to it (see an enhanced sample that supplements but does not replace the text above).

Have students submit their assignments electronically via Checkmate

Turnitin.com's original model is that individual students submit their own work to Turnitin.com. The problem with this, besides having to teach students how to use the system and dealing with their difficulties, is that a student could easily submit a plagiarized version to the instructor for grading and a different, non-plagiarized version to Turnitin.com. Some instructors may be willing to live with this, or to grade students' work directly from their Turnitin.com submissions; if so, that course of action is available.

But the better way to handle this is to have students make a single electronic submission using the Checkmate system in ICS (checkmate.ics.uci.edu). Those submissions can be downloaded and viewed or printed for grading; they can also be collected and submitted in a batch to Turnitin.com.

Review the Turnitin.com similarity reports

Within a couple of days after the assignments are submitted to Turnitin.com, the instructor can log back in to Turnitin.com and view the similarity report. As always, these reports should serve as indications of papers that merit further (human) investigation; accusations shouldn't be made solely on the strength of any automated tool.