Master of Child and Family Health: Academic integrity

Plagiarism

Check out the fun, innovative video below that explores:

• what plagiarism is
• different types of plagiarism
• penalties for plagiarising
• tips for preventing plagiarism

Turnitin is the originality checking software used by Federation University and other institutions. It is sometimes referred to as plagiarism detection software, although this isn’t technically correct.

There are two ways that Turnitin can be used. In both cases a report is generated which you can use to improve your work.

• For students: The Turnitin report can be used to check for errors you have made. It may find mistakes in your referencing, use of quotations, or the quality of paraphrasing. It will also find a lot of things which are not really a concern, for example many commonly used phrases, names, terms or data sequences may come up in a similarity report. That is why we need to review the report rather than just accepting the percentage number it generates.
• The second use of Turnitin is when your assignment is submitted to your tutor through Turnitin. In this case your tutor will examine your Turnitin report and you will be marked on mistakes found in your referencing and punctuation. Unacceptable levels of direct copying or poorly attributed work may result in a charge of plagiarism being raised.

There is no rule around an acceptable and an unacceptable percentage in similarity scores.  A very well referenced paper may return a high score due to the appropriate use of quotes or the use of certain phrases and naming conventions, whereas an unacceptable submission may also have a high similarity score due to academic integrity problems and breaches.

Turnitin does not detect plagiarism, but when a high percentage score is achieved on your report it means that a high percentage of your work is exactly the same as various other peoples works. This would be a matter of concern to your tutor and they may then start to examine your work for plagiarism. What usually gives you away in plagiarism is that we each have our own writing styles. When the style suddenly changes mid assignment your tutor starts to examine where the different text has come from!

Submitting a paper into a Turnitin Link

It is important to use the link provided for you by your tutor on your unit Moodle site. If you use a generic site from other sites, it will not recognise your work for your specific unit and give an originality report of 100%, even though it is your own original work.

If you are not familiar with using Turnitin, check out the video below.