by:
  Michael Donnelly,
  Rebecca Ingalls,
  Tracy Ann Morse,
  Joanna Castner, and
  Anne Meade
  Stockdell-Giesler

  Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
   by Tracy Ann Morse

As a new faculty member at The University of Tampa, I took part in orientations that covered many aspects of the new community I joined. One of the topics covered in one of those orientations was the school's subscription to and use of a dominant anti-plagiarism system: Turnitin.com. Prior to this orientation, I was familiar with Turnitin.com. However, this is the first institution where I have taught that has programmatically instituted and encouraged the use of the service.

As we were given the institution's login and password by the Associate Dean of Students, I scratched down the information in the margin of a handout. As part of her presentation, the Associate Dean of Students quoted statistics from a voluntary survey conducted with the institution's students. These statistics conveyed that more than half of the students taking part in the survey self-reported they often cheat or plagiarize.

This informal statistic is in line with national statistics that state:

On most campuses, more than 75 percent of students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments (Finkel, 2005, p.7).

In "Sticky Fingers on the Information Superhighway," Ed Finkel (2005) cites the research of the founder of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, Dr. Donald L. McCabe, to show the prevalence of plagiarism and the cavalier attitudes of students towards plagiarism: "The percentage of students who say they had cut and pasted material from the Internet rose from 10 percent in 1999 to 41 percent in a 2001 survey, with 68 percent saying it wasn't a serious issue" (p. 7).

While many students may casually view their plagiarism as unimportant, many universities, like The University of Tampa, are instituting programs to prevent and catch plagiarism. At the orientation I attended, the tone of the Associate Dean's presentation on plagiarism at The University of Tampa was matter of fact. Yet, we were encouraged as new faculty to "police" the students we taught by submitting their writing to Turnitin.com before grading it.

• Introduction: A Writing Program Director's Dilemma
• Flying, Finally
• The Role of the WPA
• The Problems with PDS
• May the Conversation Continue...
• Dissimulation in the Writing Classroom
• The Devaluing of Growth?
• A Lack of Ethics
• An Ethos of Academic Integrity
• Students Consenting to Turnitin.com: What Are We Asking When We Ask Them to Sign Away Their Work?
• The Concept of Intellectual Property
• Roots of Consent
• Why "Consent" May Not Be Sufficient
• Turnitin.com: A Teaching Tool
• Responsibility for Writing
• A Focus on Revision
• Turnitin: Oversimplified Answer to a Complex Problem
• Skill and Creativity
• Self-Fulfilling Prophesies
• A Stimulus to Creativity
• Engagement and Success
• Conclusion
• References
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