Use Plagiarism Prevention Tools at Boise State

Turnitin is Boise State’s plagiarism prevention tool. It is integrated with Canvas so that plagiarism review can be run on student submissions to Canvas assignments.

Turnitin accepts files in a wide variety of file formats, including .doc, .docx, .txt, .ppt, and .pdf.

Turnitin compares student submissions to texts in their database and on the web. Turnitin generates a similarity report, which displays a similarity score, the percentage of matching text. The similarity score does not indicate plagiarism has occurred. The similarity score is one tool that the instructor can use to determine if plagiarism has occurred.

1. Longer/more formal/final writing pieces: If an instructor breaks the writing process into discrete tasks (an annotated bibliography, essay plan, introductory paragraph, drafts), the instructor can inform students that the final draft may be subject to plagiarism review.

   1. What about earlier drafts? It is not recommended to use use Turnitin for draft papers because students may not have cited sources in a draft, but they will likely do so in the final version.

2. In response to pervasive citation misuse in a course: If students struggle with proper attribution, instructors can provide support on how and why to cite and announce that writing may be submitted for plagiarism review. One study shows that when students know that a plagiarism tool will be used, they are less likely to engage in intentional plagiarism.

3. If something reads strangely: Instructors read a lot of student writing develop a keen sense of voice and sometimes notice that something seems odd. If something reads strangely (voice changes, style/voice is inconsistent from the student’s other writing, etc.), instructors can use Turnitin.

Please see this article for directions on using Turnitin for Canvas assignments

See this article for directions on accessing Turnitin reports in Canvas SpeedGrader.

Consider your prompts:

• If students are asked to respond to a relatively factual or structured prompt, their answers simply can’t deviate from one another too much and still be correct. This can increase originality scores.

  • Example: If a prompt asks students to summarize one text’s main ideas, this might increase similarity scores because the possible responses are limited.

Consider your discipline’s specialty levels:

• Are you teaching a highly-specific subject matter? (Example: students write a narrative about the presence and responses to different heart arrhythmias in nursing.) Students’ repeated and correct usage of these discipline-specific terms in their writing can increase similarity scores. It doesn’t necessarily mean plagiarism is afoot - sometimes it just means that everyone is tracking the discipline-specific concepts and terms well. This might be a type of writing you wouldn't use plagiarism review for. 

Consider students’ experience with citations, and their need for reminders and support:

• Are students citing incorrectly? Are they using quotes that are significantly too long because they don’t yet know how/ why/ where to cut them into useful bits for their writing, and take the rest out?

  • This is not plagiarism. It is misuse of sources, often based on a developmental phase of writing. We recommend using our Writing Center’s resources, or teaching students about writing conventions from your discipline by considering and offering the ways you learned how to do it yourself. 

• No matter how “experienced,” “advanced,” and “intelligent/ talented/ hard-working” a student may be, and no matter how much one may feel it isn’t one’s job to teach “basic elements of writing,” sometimes it is. It is instructors' responsibility to support students who do not understand citation practices.

Turnitin has a secure database and has gone through a review for FERPA compliance. It is safe to save student submissions to the database; this means that future submissions will be analyzed against past student submissions.

However, an instructor can choose not to save student submissions to the database when setting up Turnitin for a Canvas assignment by unchecking the box for “Index All Submissions.”