Turnitin - a practical manualDavid Duindam & Daan Wesselman – LCA

As of August 15, 2017, Turnitin has definitively replaced Ephorus as a plagiarism scanner. In practice, this means that Turnitin will become the norm for submitting assignments digitally. Apart from a plagiarism scan, Turnitin has other tools for assessing written work that instructors can use productively. Yet unfortunately it’s not always clear how Turnitin can or should be used – hence this manual.

We’ve looked at the possibilities that Turnitin offers, explicitly from an instructor’s perspective, trying to identify and find solutions for things that are unhandy or missing. Most importantly, we’ve tried to identify effective ways to make use of Turnitin that can benefit our teaching practice.

(Note: this manual was written specifically with the practices in our own department – Literary and Cultural Analysis – in mind. Our points might be useful for other departments as well, but of course practices, usages and needs might differ.)

Versions & questionsTurnitin is constantly being developed further, as is its implementation by the UvA. The manual below is based on the version that was current in the summer of 2017. It’s possible that changes have been made at a later date.

If you have any questions regarding Turnitin, you can always contact the people from the ICT department: icto-fgw@uva.nl.

Turnitin Direct AssignmentStarting Aug. 15, 2017, the way to make Turnitin assignments in Blackboard changes: not with a web link to a module outside Blackboard, but within Blackboard itself.

When making an assignment, choose “Turnitin Direct Assignment” (TDA). Other options (like plain “Turnitin”) should be ignored.

Configuring a TDA largely speaks for itself, but there are a few things to take into account:

- “Overall grade”: 100 (in principle)- “Grading Schema”: “score” (in principle)- “Reveal grades immediately”: best set to “no”

o Setting this to “yes” would mean that any grade you enter is immediately put through to the BB gradebook, meaning that the student can immediately see this. However, if you have a large number of assignments to grade and would like to review the grades you gave at the start, this is not something you want the students to see.

o So: best set this setting to “no” until you’re done grading all assignments, and then changing the setting to “yes” (under “Modify”)

- “Post date”: this is best set well into the future, at or after the date when you expect to be done with marking assignments

o This is the date from which the students have access to your feedback. As with the grade, you might want to make this available only once you’re done with all assignments.

o This setting can be changed to whenever you want, but not under “modify” (for unclear reasons), but under “Edit parts” (see below).

After the basic configuration of an assignment, you can configure what tools will be used for grading and reviewing it.

- Configure rubrics and grading forms using the Rubric Manager- Select, edit or import Quickmark sets in the Quickmark manager- Use the Peermark manager to configure peer review work, and review Peermark reviews - Edit parts to set the number of parts for the assignment and their respective grade or weight

Important: rubrics and grading forms need to be configured before using them. Once used to grade one submission, they cannot be altered.

Assignment partsAssignments can be configured to have different parts, which can be renamed and weighted under “Edit parts” from the toolbox. This is useful in cases where 1 overall writing assignment has clearly distinct parts, e.g. “Intro” “Body” “Conclusion”.

This can be particularly useful for submitting chapters of a thesis separately and scanning for plagiarism at every stage. Later parts do not seem to be compared against earlier ones, so a part defined as “final version” should not result in being copied from chapters submitted previously.

Submitting assignments: what if Turnitin is down?Turnitin depends on external servers that turn out to be down occasionally. Unfortunately, the FGw cannot do much about this. It is therefore recommended that each course manual includes some sort of protocol for when the servers are down, to prevent insecurity and panic among students.

Here’s a sample text that can be included:

- If you cannot submit a document because either Turnitin or Blackboard is down and you therefore cannot meet a deadline, please follow these steps:

1: Don’t panic.2: Try again a few minutes later, preferably using another browser or computer, to see if it’s not a problem at your end (if so, this is your responsibility). 3: If the servers are really down, email your assignment to your instructor, to show that you finished it and tried to submit it before the deadline. 4: Once the servers are back up, still upload your assignment via Blackboard, for feedback, grading, and scanning for plagiarism. Even if you emailed your assignment on time, it cannot be processed unless you upload it once the servers are back up.

Plagiarism scanOne of the main uses of Turnitin is to scan submissions for plagiarism. Apart from searching the internet and libraries, Turnitin also scans a database of previously submitted assignments. It is therefore important that all written work is submitted through Turnitin, to prevent students from reusing their fellow student’s assignment from last year, for example.

The results look something like this:

Passages are marked and paired to the online sources. In case of plagiarism, this Turnitin report needs to be submitted to the exam committee.

You can also tell from this example that the standard placeholder text – plucked in its entirety from a single website – is identified as only 75% plagiarized, from 6 sources. In other words, the scan is good at generally indicating plagiarism, but it’s not perfect in the details. Hence, one of the key properties of this scan remains its role as a deterrent.

Giving grades and feedbackIf you use only quickmarks/comments and “feedback summary” to give feedback, the overall grade for the assignment needs to be entered manually in the appropriate field. Rubrics and grading forms can be used for weighted grading according to the criteria you set in advance.

Feedback summaryYou can use “Feedback Summary” for general remarks on the assignment as a whole. This is the easiest and most general way to give feedback. You can also leave a voice message, if you are so inclined.

Advantages

- Freest form of giving feedback- Teacher decides the focus of the feedback - Teacher decides the grade

Disadvantages

- Can take a lot of time- Harder to standardize when cooperating with other teachers in a course

What to use this for

- Could be used for anything, best as a supplement to other feedback/assessment tools

Using QuickmarksThe Quickmark tool provides 3 ways to add comments to papers. You can either select text to which the comment pertains, or you can just click anywhere to have the comment appear there.

- “Inline text” is the equivalent of writing something in the margins as if you were writing on paper

- The Comment function (speech bubble) is better suited for longer custom feedback- The Quickmark function allows you to select standard feedback, to which you can also add

custom feedback

While the first two options are equivalents to working on paper or to using the comment function in Word, the Quickmark function can really speed up correction work.

The set of Quickmarks you use is personal, attached to each user separately. Your default set is loaded upon logging in. There is an “LCA departmental starter kit” that you can import to get you started with Quickmarks that are better suited to the kind of assignments that we use. If you’d like this, just email Daan Wesselman (d.v.wesselman@uva.nl). But you can add your own Quickmarks as you go along, to customize your set.

Advantages

- Comments/inline text are effectively the same as working on paper or with comments in Word. This allows for detailed feedback.

- Quickmarks allow you to very quickly give standard feedback.- After the initial work to tailor your own Quickmark set, this can really save a lot of time.

Disadvantages

- No possibility to make actual changes in the text (equivalent to using “track changes” in Word)

- Text in assignment is not searchable or copyable- The Turnitin interface is not ideal, meaning that for larger papers (particularly relevant for

work in MA courses and theses) downloading the papers from Turnitin, giving feedback in Word, and emailing the students their feedback is the better solution (since it is not possible to upload/attach a document to a submitted paper).

What to use this for

- Short & medium writing assignments, especially when students are free to choose their own topic and when content considerations are key

RubricsTurnitin makes it possible to grade an assignment on the basis of criteria that are decided beforehand. There are different possibilities: if you want to grade the assignment per criterion, add standard feedback and if want to determine the overall grade like this, you can use a standard rubric. This needs to be configured per assignment in the rubric manager (but this can be copied and adapted from previous assignments fairly easily). Here is an example:

The feedback gives the student something to hold on to, but this standard rubric does not allow for specific comments per criterion.

Grading assignment can be done relatively quickly. As soon as a rubric has been attached to an assignment, grading takes only a few clicks. The rubric above was made in the rubric manager and leads to the interface for grading assignments below:

In this example the four criteria have been configured as an insufficient (1p), sufficient (3p), good (4p) or excellent (5p) (note: these values can all be adjusted). The final grade is calculated automatically. By clicking the black button the grade is automatically added to Blackboard’s grade center.

It is also possible to make a rubric without adding points: a qualitative rubric. As with a standard rubric, you assign a value for each criterion, but enter the final grade manually.

Advantages

- Clear communication of criteria and their weight- Standard feedback in relation to the criteria- Clear how the final grade is composed- Grading is a relatively easy process - Good integration with Blackboard’s grade center (less admin) - Facilitates cooperation with other teachers to keep grading consistent -

Disadvantages

- Some teachers avoid predetermined criteria, for example because this can lead to grades that run counter to a general impression. A student could have fulfilled all criteria even if the paper is poor; or you might want to deduct or add points because of special circumstances (late submission; exceptional creativity or insight)

- Trickier to operationalize for larger (MA) assignments- Relatively greater investment required beforehand, when the gains might not yet be evident

What to use this for

- Short & medium writing assignments, especially for first-year courses and larger numbers of students

- Take-home exams (future experiment)

Grading formsAnother way to grade an assignment is by way of unweighted criteria, using a grading form.

You can give specific feedback per criterion. You can also manually give points per criterion, on a scale from 0-100 (see below left). You can also use a grading form without giving points (below right).

Advantages

- Easy to configure- Offers freedom in grading and using criteria- Possible to give specific feedback per criterion

Disadvantages

- No possibility for standardized feedback- No possibility for automatic weighing of criteria- Grading takes more time than when using a rubric

What to use this for

- Assignments that call for feedback that’s in between what a rubric can do and what can be done with detailed quickmarks

- In cases where clear criteria have been provided (e.g. the steps in an argumentative paper, or clearly delimited aspects of a research assignment) so that students know what to accomplish in their assignment, but detailed feedback isn’t necessary.

Overall: when to use whatAs mentioned, it is generally best to use more than one tool. For example, Quickmarks can allow you to give a great deal of detailed feedback, but it’s useful to also use one of the other three tools alongside, like a clear feedback summary. Only using rubrics is usually insufficient, because a student then only receives standardized feedback; yet this is fine for a short assignment like submitting a discussion point that doesn’t need extensive feedback.

The crux is to line up the aims of assignment, the time the instructor has available when grading, and the possibilities that Turnitin offers. There’s always combination to be found – excepts for longer written assignments like research papers of 3000+ words or thesis; the Turnitin interface does not really offer any advantages for that type of work.

In general, our experiments with Turnitin in different courses have told us that it might take a little time to come up with a productive and workable assignment and configuration (e.g. of rubrics) beforehand, but that the rewards of using Turnitin very clearly outweigh the initial investment.

Peer review with PeermarkTurnitin has an extensive module for peer work, called PeerMark. However, since we don’t often work with peer review assignments (other than informal work in class), we have not been able to extensively test this. Accordingly, we cannot make any specific recommendations here. Our general

impression is that the tools and interface look promising, but that configuring and designing peer tasks that go beyond a 1-on-1 peer review is tricky. For example, configuring a group of 4 students who look at each other’s work is finicky.

However, this is clearly an area that can do with further experimentation in courses. So if you have any experience with Peermark, please let us know!

General considerationsSome final general remarks:

Cooperation between staff

Turnitin has clear benefits for cooperation when teaching a course with multiple instructors; you can easily see each other’s style of giving feedback and grading, for example. The embedding of Academic English assignments in regular first-year courses was a clear example where it can be useful to be able to see how a fellow instructor’s has graded assignments.

At the same time, certain aspects of grading can be taken care of by or in Turnitin (e.g. managing and weighing criteria), which requires that instructors have the same ideas about this. Hence, using Turnitin effectively requires some discussion beforehand – which in itself is a good thing.

Submission and archiving

Especially the new Turnitin Direct Assignment is a clear, uniform channel for submitting work. It’s also quite useful for archiving purposes: assignments are simply stored in Turnitin (rather than individual instructors’ USB drive, for example), with the benefit that they are used in future plagiarism scans.

Other general positive findings

- The interface on the students’ side seems to work fine: no reports of anything being unclear.- Using Turnitin makes didactic processes explicit, for example by requiring clearly formulated

criteria. This can benefit instructors because a clearer aims and scopes of assignments can make correction easier and quicker, for example. It also benefits students if criteria are clear.

- Efficiency: especially if you have large numbers of students, using Turnitin has proven to save a lot of time, even with minimal initial investment in designing and configuring assignments.

General negative findings

- The system depends on servers that are beyond the UvA’s control, and they have been down too often in the past year. There’s little that the UvA can do about this, and when using Turnitin there’s no alternative channel for submitting work. The best that can be done is a disclaimer and set of instructions what to do when the system is down (see above).

- The interface has some design flaws. These will hopefully be fixed in the future, but they are noticeable and they require workarounds in some cases.

- As with all extensive tools, there are possibilities (e.g. the pre-set Quickmarks) that aren’t of any use in certain contexts, which can create unhandy “static” when first using Turnitin.

- Turnitin has clearly not been designed for longer written work, like theses. It’s necessary to use Turnitin for submission of written work, for the sake of plagiarism scanning. But when using Turnitin for feedback on longer texts isn’t handy, it would be nice to be able to upload a document (e.g. a Word document with comments, edits, etc.) as feedback – but this isn’t possible at the moment, so a workaround (e.g. sumitting via Turnitin and returning with feedback via email) is required.