“In our first blog “Does Turnitin Detect Plagiarism?” we said that Turnitin does not detect plagiarism but, rather, generates a similarity index indicating text matches to the Turnitin databases. Instructors and their students can use that information to determine if  there are issues with intentional or unintentional plagiarism. So, while Turnitin does not specifically “detect” plagiarism, instructors can work towards plagiarism proofing their written assignments by implementing Turnitin and WriteCycle tools in their courses using some well-documented best practices.

Research suggests that assignments can be made more difficult to plagiarize if instructors:

• Emphasize the recursiveness of writing.¹
• Require significantly revised multiple drafts.¹
• Break an assignment into parts that are to be turned in at different stages of the creation process: pre-writing, drafting, revising, reflecting.¹

This idea of plagiarism proofing assignments makes sense, suggesting that students are less likely to leave the work to the last minute—when research and writing skills may deteriorate or students might be tempted to use writing that is not their own—if they are engaged in writing as a process.”

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