HAVE U TURNED IT IN?

This is the word for which most of us possess a phobia!

It is the same word, students get obsessed with during week 9 and 10 of study term.

It happens to be the most pronounced word by students and academicians and even the student service personnel!

So if you wondering what it is --of course I was mentioning the “Turnitin”.

Here we go again, so what are you supposed to turn in- turn ? in. If that is the question, nearly everything, even your life. Coz this measures how much of it is original and how much  of it is duplicate.  OKies so far, I was juz kidding.

Moving on to more serious stuff- Why turnitin?

A standard set by  Coventry University  and many other top ranking Universities in evaluating student  assignments is to get the report on originality of their work , as generated by turnitin.

How does turnitin generate the report?

When the student uploads their work that has to be checked by turnitin, it is checked against its  databases of contents-  for patterns of strings that matches or nearly matches any of the materials that are indexed and stored by turnitin.

Now, do you wanna know how much material is stored on the database that turnitin owns –

20+ billions web pages crawled – on the increase this minute you are reading this article!

220 + million archived student papers – on the increase again, every term as students keep uploading their assignments for grading purposes.

120 + million articles from 90,000 + journals, periodicals and books(Turnitin, 2012) – on the increase as more authors are writing new papers and journals

The above information did not drop from my brain- I took it from the turnitin web page.

Turnitin also has a literary collection via the Gutenberg project.

  

Who developed turnitin?

John Barrie is the name – a  PhD holder from UC Berkeley along with three other graduate students are the developers and owners of this intellectual product that has become a norm in nearly every part of the world(Turnitin, 2012).

Dos  and Don’ts:

As part of assignment fulfillment, students have to submit their assignments or reports that they have created, to the software to check for originality.

While doing so, you may have to keep some points in mind-

1. Submit ahead of time, do not delay until the last day, when your submission of coursework is due to be dropped in the drop box!!

2. Check whether you turnitin account is working, as soon as the lecturer has created the class space for the module.

3. In case the account is indicating problems, approach your lecturer for help. Do not upload in other module spaces or through your friend’s account. (whoa this sure happens!!! Don’t do it anymore.)

4. Make sure you give the correct e-mail address to the lecturer who is in charge of the module.

5. Once the report is generated the first time and it indicates a high percentage of copied work, rephrase your work based on the color coded report that is generated.

6. Having uploaded for the second time, through the resubmission button, wait for at least 24hrs for the second time report generation(some of you may be lucky to get it immediately- but as the due date approaches traffic is high  and it may take time).

7. Do not copy word for word from internet sources. Try to write the ideas in your own words.

8. Last but not the least , don’t ever forget to provide in-text citation and the reference list for the portions taken from  reliable sources. (Of course you aren’t allowed to refer to unreliable sources!) Use the Harvard Reference Mechanism for referencing works of others.

Yes, with that I believe you should be able to confidently submit your coursework on to turnitin, and get the “live happily ever after” kinda feeling. J

Ok- Here I go, I am gonna reference my work!

Reference List:

 iParadigm, 2012.Our History:2009-present. [online] Available at: <http://turnitin.com/en_us/about-us/our-company> [Accessed 13 April 2012 ].