Plagiarism and Turnitin

The internet has opened the door to a wealth of information and sources for our students to use in their studies. However, the consequence is that it also makes it too easy to simply copy content off the internet and paste it into one's research task as one's own work.

Plagiarism is an extremely common problem and is often the result of a lack of knowledge, skills and conscience.

The challenges teachers face is to educate our students about academic integrity and plagiarism and to give them the tools and skills necessary to avoid plagiarizing.

Plagiarism is a serious ethical offence and can have severe consequences. Most cases of plagiarism can be avoided, however, by citing sources. Acknowledging that your material has been borrowed and providing the audience with the information necessary to find that source is a positive step to preventing plagiarism.

We have recently subscribed to an originality checking and plagiarism prevention service called Turnitin that checks a student's writing for citation mistakes and inappropriate copying. 

When a student submits a paper into Turnitin, the software compares the submitted work against a massive repository or database of texts, student work, books, articles etc and generates a similarity report which helps to identify possible instances of plagiarism.

Based on the results of the similarity report, a student has the opportunity to edit his work in such a way that all the sources that have been used have been acknowledged and cited correctly.

We have spent time helping our Grade 12 boys in their Life Orientation Research Essays. Using the referencing and citation tools in MsWord they have been shown how to cite their sources correctly and to generate the bibiography for their assignment.

All their assignments have been submitted through Turnitin and the boys have been able to re-work their essays whenever the similarity report indicated a high similarity index. This has been an important developmental and learning process for the boys in preparation for what they are likely to experience at University.