TurnItIn: Feedback Studio Updates and Contract Cheating

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We’ve talked about TurnItIn before in our Three Tips for Accurate Similarity Report Assessment, where we discussed how to efficiently set up TurnItIn to easily interpret the Similarity Report. Today we’re going to look at some updates to the tool which make TurnItIn even more robust and useful. TurnItIn now flags replaced or hidden characters as well as equips instructors to address suspicions that a student didn’t write a submitted paper.

Feedback Studio Flags

This new section of the Feedback Studio marks items that you should review. A Flag does not guarantee a problem – it just identifies an item that warrants your attention. You can select a Flag to view more details.

The Feedback Studio Flags focus on items that are difficult or impossible to identify by eye, such as replaced characters or hidden text. Replaced characters are from other alphabets but look identical or virtually identical to ours. TurnItIn automatically fixes this by using the proper Latin characters when running the similarity report so the score is not affected, but they still mark those characters since the original intent was to bypass the similarity report.

Hidden text is also sometimes used as a way to try to beat the system. In their documentation, TurnItIn gives the example of hidden quotation marks – these hidden marks could be intended to hide plagiarism when an instructor has the “exclude quotes” setting turned on. However, TurnItIn now identifies these instances so they won’t be able to slip under the radar.

For more information on this, check out TurnItIn’s documentation on Flags.

Contract Cheating

TurnItIn has also been doing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning research and development to give instructors more context about student work, including information about potential contract cheating – students purchasing work to turn in. TurnItIn is now able to track trends in student writing and identify anomalies that could suggest a different author. They also are able to work with more metadata from the submissions that can be reviewed to shed more light on a situation. For more information about what TurnItIn is doing about contract cheating, check out How to Prevent Contract Cheating in Remote Learning.

If you suspect a case of contract cheating in your course, please email ctl@cedarville.edu and the CTL Director will connect with you and assist you in your investigation.