Will help students evaluate and improve writing and referencing
Sara Thompson
Public relations assistant
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
The pilot of a cloud-based originality checking service at Avondale this semester will help students evaluate and improve their writing and referencing.
The service, called Turnitin, consists of three tools, OriginalityCheck, GradeMark and PeerMark, but Avondale is only using the first during the pilot.
OriginalityCheck uses pattern recognition algorithms to identify unoriginal text by matching assessment tasks against more than 24 billion web pages, 300 million student papers and 120 million articles from 90,000 journals, periodicals and books. Avondale will use the tool in conjunction with its Academic Integrity Policy.
Vice-president (research) Professor Tony Williams says the pilot is not to test Turnitin but to establish how to apply it. “The service can be used in a purely punitive manner or as a learning experience, and we prefer the latter. Plagiarism is not a straight forward issue and for success, Turnitin needs to be imbedded in our learning environment.”
Avondale is piloting Turnitin in about 20 units covering undergraduate and postgraduate courses and representing all faculties. Students enrolled in these units will submit a designated Turnitin assessment task through Moodle to obtain an originality report and similarity score.
Text in submitted tasks that matches text in the Turnitin database is highlighted. The highlighted text will include correctly cited text and inappropriately cited text. All matching text is colour coded to help students identify their sources. A similarity score indicates the degree of unoriginal text in the submitted assessment task.
Project manager Rose Howson says Turnitin is an opportunity for students to identify and resolve weaknesses in their academic writing. “Brush up on your referencing skills!” she suggests. “By submitting assessment tasks well ahead of the due date, you’ll receive reports and be able to make adjustments. This helps improve the quality and academic integrity of your written work.”
It is good for the institution, too. “We base much of our activity as academics and students on academic integrity,” says Tony. “We’re all best served by understanding its principles and practices and adopting it as an attitude.”
More than 10,000 institutions in 126 countries use Turnitin to manage the submission, tracking and evaluation of assessment tasks online. Two of the institutions in Australia include The University of Newcastle, which has been integrating Turnitin with its courses from as early as 2004, and Charles Sturt University, which has signed a memorandum of understanding with Avondale.
Avondale plans to integrate Turnitin with all applicable units from 2014.