DQ 3-3

DQ 3-3 Responses

1.

Grand Canyon University expects its students to uphold high academic standards and integrity.   When submitting a work to instructors that is over 500 words, in order to ensure the student is submitting original work that is free from plagiarism and academic dishonesty, GCU requires students to submit the work to Turnitin.  Turnitin is a web-based software application that assists students in ensuring that GCU's academic expectations are honored and met.  ("About Turnitin")

 

Turnitin is valuable since it verifies the originality of a student's submission, cross-referencing it with a database of millions of student papers and articles as well as searching billions of webpages for similarities in the text.  Once the work is cross-referenced, a report is sent to the student that shows the percentage of the report that is possibly unoriginal, highlighting and listing the original sources and the percentage of the submitted work that may have originated from that source. (Turnitin FAQ's)

 

There are great benefits of using Turnitin.  Along with assisting with the decrease in the occurances of plagiarism and academic dishonesty, it assists the student in becoming familiar with proper citation and references of sources.  Additionally, Turnitin protects and student's intellectual property by preventing the unauthorized use of their own work (Turnitin FAQ's).

 

About Turnitin.  (2018).  Academic integrity.  Grand Canyon University.  Retrieved from https://students.gcu.edu/academics/academic-integrity.php

 

Turnitin frequently asked questions. (2018). Academic integrity. Grand Canyon University.  Retrieved from https://students.gcu.edu/Documents/Turn-it-in-FAQs.pdf

2.

Graduate School is mostly research paper and improving academic skills to enter the professional world. As Savage (2006) mentioned, with the evolution of the technology, the use of internet increased and put students at high risk for plagiarism and academic dishonesty. Because plagiarism is not always black or white researchers have found out that “turnitin” was the most widely used and suitable detection system for plagiarism. (Savage, 2006)

“Turnitin” helps students review their work for plagiarism by pointing out words, phrases, paragraph ever used by someone else that one might have put into his work knowingly or not which doesn’t reflect his personal work or knowledge. By doing so, students can correct their work, make changes and submit a better research paper while promoting their academic growth.

 

References

Shelly Savage. (2006). Staff and Student Responses to a Trial of Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Software. Retrieved from https://citl.indiana.edu/files/pdf/savage.pdf

3.

As part of the process that improves writing skills across the board, Turnitin is one such tool. Turnitin is a web based application that checks for unoriginal material submitted as part of most university programs. This application is able to check “paper, homework, lab reports, computer code etc.” (Reihman, 2005). While the application can and is used as a policing tool it also provides a useful platform to instruct and guide a student as it provides useful information about academic integrity. However, the application alone cannot guarantee academic integrity but it does play an important role therein.

There are limitations to the application however; Turnitin cannot teach students how to source or cite information properly. Further, the application finds text that matches other documents, but it is unable to severalize between source material that has been used correctly and plagiarized material. Additionally, the application will not detect all items that involve plagiarism, for example it will detect actual text copies but not necessarily ideas that are copied (Reihman, 2005).

References:

Reihman, G. (November 2005). Turnitin. Center for innovation in teaching and learning: Lehigh University. Retrieved from: https://citl.lehigh.edu/turnitin