What are the best practice recommendations for the summative use of Turnitin?

The main value of Turnitin (or other text-matching software) is its use as a formative educational tool to help raise awareness and educate students about plagiarism, and to provide a source of formative feedback on their writing. However, depending on the nature of the module assessment, students' work may be submitted to the service to support the marking process, in line with the University's Academic Conduct Regulation.

The following protocols guide the summative use of Turnitin:

•  There are four recommended methods of using Turnitin summatively. The chosen method should be made clear to the students at the outset of the assessment process:

1. All summative work is submitted to Blackboard and simultaneously uploaded to Turnitin by students and all Similarity Reports are reviewed.
2. All summative work is submitted to Blackboard and simultaneously uploaded to Turnitin by students and a sample (either random or banded random) of Similarity Reports are reviewed.
3. A sample (either random or banded random) of summative work that have been submitted to Blackboard are uploaded to Turnitin on behalf of the students and those corresponding Similarity Reports are reviewed.
4. Only suspect pieces of work that have been submitted to Blackboard are uploaded to Turnitin on behalf of the students purely to try to formally evidence plagiarism, as a support to subjective academic judgement.

• Any summative use of Turnitin should follow opportunities for students to use Turnitin to provide a source of formative feedback on their writing.