How TurnItIn.Com is Used In Our Class

First, find out What the Symbols Mean in my Canvas Gradebook.

Turnitin.com is a plagiarism detection tool to be used by a human (me) to help determine if there is an issue with submitting work that is not your own. Always submit your answers in worksheets with the questions left intact. Yes, the system will “flag” those, but that is ok because having a high unoriginal percentage is only an indication – it is up to me, the human, to see if there is a problem. TurnItIn will color code the unoriginal scores from green to red – again, this is just a tool for me to use. Depending on the nature of the assignment, some of your work will naturally get flagged high because of the worksheet used paired with naturally short answers. A tool is just a tool, neither bad nor good. As long as you are doing your own work, paraphrasing (i.e., putting things into your own words to show understanding), and citing your sources in CSE Name Year Style ( https://www.marypoffenroth.com/cse) you will be just fine.

As long as you are writing and submitting your own work and paraphrasing with citations of others’ work, you will be good to go.

Check out this great resource on How to Paraphrase for guidance.

If I ever feel there is an issue, I will personally contact you to chat before any action is taken.

If you are submitting answers to questions, please make sure to leave the questions in your responses. Yes, I know TurnItIn.com will flag them, but again – it is only a tool for a human user to apply to interpret results. It makes it much harder to grade if you delete the questions, so please leave them in your responses as appropriate.

There might be a bit of confusion since TurnItIn.com is sometimes used as an outside website. It is now fully integrated into Canvas. You just submit it into the folder for the assignment, and you will see the “turnitin.com” submission upload area. Make sure you are on an actual desktop/laptop computer. Do not use the mobile app or a mobile device to submit assignments since those have proven unreliable.