Quality Assurance and Enhancement

Manual of General Regulations

POLICY ON THE USE OF TURNITIN WITHIN UEL

Rationale

Turnitin is an internet-based text matching service that has been developed by a commercial company. It is used, under license, by most UK Universities, including the University of East London. Work that is submitted to Turnitin generates a Turnitin Originality report, showing which parts of it have been reproduced from which sources. This policy sets out how we use the service in connection with student work.

Our Policy

1. We recognise the educational desirability that all of our students should enjoy the opportunity to self-submit their work to Turnitin (before submitting for assessment). We also recognise that Turnitin Originality Reports will sometimes assist in the identification of plagiarised work submitted for assessment.
2. We will make Turnitin available to all of our students by way of our virtual learning environment (UELPlus) and we will encourage them to use it to improve their referencing skills.
3. All students will be given the opportunity to make multiple submissions of their written work to Turnitin.
4. All students will be advised, at the point of enrolment, that their work will be made available to third parties (such as Turnitin) for specified purposes, by way of a clause to be added to the Student Contract (the proposed clause, as suggested by Turnitin UK and JISCPAS, is set out in Annex I) and will be referred to Turnitin’s Questions and Answers for Students .
5. A Module Leader may decide, in accordance with the policy of the appropriate School, that all student submissions for a particular component of assessment should be submitted to Turnitin, provided that the relevant Module Guide includes a notice to that effect.
6. All postgraduate research students will be required to submit their dissertations to Turnitin.
7. Where Turnitin submission is required of work that will contribute to summative assessment and the student fails to submit, s/he will be awarded a mark of 0 for the component in question.
8. An Originality Report should never be advanced as the sole reason for suspecting that a piece of work is plagiarised, because the judgement as to whether work is plagiarised must always be an academic judgement.

Guidance for staff on the use of Turnitin is available to view and download at: http://www.uel.ac.uk/elearning/uelplus/staff/turnitin/index.htm

Guidance for students on the use of Turnitin is available to view and download at:http://www.uel.ac.uk/elearning/uelplus/student/turnitin/index.htm

We will publish advice on what to do in the event that the Turnitin service is not available in the period immediately before an assessment deadline.

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© 2007