Trento University has decided to adopt the Turnitin service to detect student plagiarism. This decision was taken after careful evaluation by a working group composed of the Dean’s Delegate for Open Access and anti-plagiarism policies, the University Legal Office, the Privacy Office, the Office for Research Results, the Online Education Office of the Teaching Department and Student Services.
Turnitin measures the similarities between a particular student text and texts published online, as well as millions of academic articles. The software identifies possible plagiarism by calculating the percentage of the student’s work which can be found word for word in online texts or in the academic articles kept in the programme’s database, and provides a source for each of the copied sections. The fact that a source text has been found does not necessarily mean that it has been copied. Nevertheless, the number of sources found is a good way of judging the originality of a piece of written work.
Note that the aim of checking a student’s work for plagiarism is not to punish him or her. Rather it should be seen as a way of preventing plagiarism and sensitising students to the issues of copyright and intellectual property.
Access to the service, for faculty only, is via the University institutional account from the Turnitin authentication page.
The programme guidelines are available online.
For any doubts or difficulties with the programme, please contact the Support Center of Turnitin.
A plugin has also been activated on the Moodle platform at the level of online courses. It allows the analysis of documents within the activities Assignment, Forum and Workshop. See the Guidelines here.
Please read the Note for faculty on the use of the Turnitin anti-plagiarism service and the Turnitin privacy policy.
For more information please contact the Online Education Office: uff.didatticaonline@unitn.it or 0461/283316.