Using TurnitinUK
TurnitinUK can be accessed from within the Nottingham Trent Online Workspace (NOW) Dropbox tool. TurnitinUK provides services that teaching staff may use for assessment and feedback purposes.
Originality checking
This allows teaching staff to check student's work for improper citation or potential plagiarism comparing it against:
- continuously updated databases of newspapers
- magazines and scholarly journals
- a repository of submitted student papers
- literary classics
- over a billion web pages (TurnitinUK Web Site).
Teaching staff may also choose to allow students to self submit and check originality of their work as part of their development of their information literacy skills.
An overview of this service is provided in the digital drop box. Also more detailed training is available to Schools on request to the Academic Liaison Team within Libraries and Learning Resources (LLR). See the LLR website for contact details of your School Liaison Librarian.
Understanding the Originality Report
TurnitinUK is a mechanical text-matching service. The service has access to the vast majority of the content available openly on the internet including archived copies of pages that may no longer be accessible. It also has access to a growing number of online journals although by no means the majority as yet. Finally it has records of most of the student assignments that have been submitted to the service.
The product of the service is the Originality Report which highlights text that the service has matched in records from another source, suggesting therefore that the text which may not be original. The report will also generate an originality index giving the amount of unoriginal text as a percentage of the assignment.
It is up to the reader of the report to determine if there is a case of academic misconduct. Interpretation of the Originality Report will be assisted by a sound knowledge of the NTU Academic Misconduct: Code of Practice in addition to the citation and referencing conventions in use for the programme.
