Committee on Educational Technology
1:00-2:00 PM, Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Present: Eric Loehr, Thomas Laughner, Jefferson Hunter, David Gregory, Marnie Anderson, Eric Brewer, Deborah Hass-Wilson, Nicholas Howe, Sara Pruss, Fraser Stables, and Adriana Chalas
Absent: John Davis & Susannah Howe
Minutes
from December 15, 2011
The minutes of the November 3rd meeting were accepted with an edit to Nick Howe’s comments on turnitin.com discussion.
Discussion of draft document “Faculty Guidelines for Using Turnitin”
Tom provided the committee with a draft for “Faculty Guidelines for Using Turnitin” and said that John Davis had requested that the policy be available for review by CAP on February 15th. The committee felt that since this is just a pilot program and data needs to be collected that they should wait and share that data with CAP. Jeff said that he would email John and say that CAP review would be more appropriate after more data has been collected.
Several edits were suggested by the committee which Tom will incorporate into a final document. He will then email that document to Jeff and John and report back to the committee with any further comments. This final document will then be distributed to faculty and a program of communication will be planned.
Faculty Guidelines for Using Turnitin
Use of Turnitin
Turnitin is a tool that allows faculty to determine what parts of a document may not be properly cited. Papers submitted to Turnitin are compared to other submitted documents as well as documents available on the Internet.
Faculty may only submit a paper to Turnitin when s/he believes a paper does not represent the work of a student.
Students shall be informed that Turnitin may be used.
Faculty shall honor student requests that their work not become part of the Turnitin database.
Notice to Students:
You must notify your students if the Turnitin service will be used. Place a notice in your syllabus and verbally inform students of the service during the first class meeting.
This is the notice that shall be placed in your syllabus.
Smith College has a license agreement with Turnitin, an educational tool that helps identify plagiarism from Internet resources. If your instructor suspects plagiarism, s/he may use the service by submitting your assignment electronically to Turnitin. The Turnitin Originality Report will indicate the amount of original text in your work and whether all material that you quoted, paraphrased, summarized, or used from another source is appropriately referenced.
If your instructor submits all or part of your assignment to the Turnitin service, Turnitin will ordinarily store that assignment in its database. The assignment will be checked to see if there is any match between your work and other material stored in Turnitin's database. If you object to long-term storage of your work in the Turnitin database, you must let your instructor know no later than two weeks after the start of this class. You have three options regarding your assignment being stored in the Turnitin database. One, if you do nothing then your assignment will be stored in the Turnitin database for the duration of Smith’s contract with Turnitin. Two, you can ask your instructor to have Turnitin store your assignment only for the duration of the semester or term, then have your assignment deleted from the Turnitin database once the class is over. Three, you can ask your instructor to change the Turnitin settings so that your assignment is not stored in the Turnitin database at any time.
Student Privacy:
Student papers are protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act as they are educational records that contain personally identifiable information. If you submit a paper or an excerpt from a paper for evaluation by Turnitin, use an alias instead of the student's name and ensure that any reference to the organization where the student is enrolled is removed before submission.
As long as students' papers are stored in the Turnitin database, your name and e-mail address will be associated with your students' papers. If the paper submitted by or on behalf of another student at Smith College or any other institution that utilizes the Turnitin database matches your student's paper, you may be contacted. Faculty are not permitted to release student papers either to other Smith faculty, faculty from other institutions, or to Turnitin unless all identifying information is removed.
Suspected Plagiarism:
In a case of suspected plagiarism, faculty should refer to Smith’s Academic Honor Code (https://www.smith.edu/sao/handbook/socialconduct/honorcode.php) and proceed accordingly.
Originality Reports:
When a paper is evaluated, Turnitin provides originality reports which tell you that text in the evaluated project or paper is similar to or identical to text Turnitin has in its database. Faculty must still evaluate the quality of the report independently and determine if the parts identified by Turnitin that are similar or identical, are actually plagiarized text. This is because all matches are shown, even those where students cited properly. As a result, faculty must critique the report they receive, use their best judgment and follow college policy before approaching a student about possible plagiarism.
Similarly, if a paper is reported as "original" by Turnitin, that is not necessarily airtight evidence that the paper is original. Instead, it may mean that the student plagiarized from a work that is not available in the Turnitin database. No database is entirely comprehensive and many sources are not digitally available. Therefore, plagiarism can occur and be undetectable by services such as Turnitin.
Based on Faculty Guidelines for Using Turnitin, created by Information and Library Services, University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, MD, and used with permission.
The meeting was adjourned at 1:45 PM; the next meeting is February 28th at 1:00 PM in Seelye B4
Respectfully,
Connie McGinn, recorder