Social, Ethical, and Legal Issues (Turnitin)

1. Turnitin, www.turnitin.com, is a web-based service that is used to check for plagiarism and originality. The service is used and trusted by millions of students, faculty, and thousands of institutions all over the world. Turnitin encourages the best practices for using and citing other people's written material.

   Turnitin is a great tool to use to ensure that the works submitted are original. It would have been a lot easier to plagiarize written works prior to Turnitin(and other similar services) being available as there was no database of documents readily available to make any comparison. I remember being in high school and it not being totally uncommon for students to turn in research papers they had acquired from another student that may have turned it in years prior. This type of plagiarism was hard to battle as it would be very difficult for any teacher to be able to keep track of all of the papers that have been submitted over the years. It would be even more unlikely for the teacher to recognize the submission as being plagiarized if the initial paper had been completed for another teacher. Turnitin maintains the database of documents and essentially does all of the work for the teacher in this respect. 

   
   

   ITSE Standard:

   4. Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility

   
   

   • c.     Promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information