Tools for faculty, students save time, promote integrity

tii-logoPULLMAN, Wash. – Two software tools are available free to students and faculty to help improve the quality of course-based papers, grant proposals and articles submitted to research publications.

ith-logoiThenticate will help writers of theses, dissertations, grants and publications verify originality and correct citation. Turnitin will enable undergraduates to write quality, original work and will assist faculty in efficient evaluation.

“Last year, when the Faculty Senate leadership approached me about plagiarism prevention software, I felt that these tools would offer a great opportunity to use technology to support a culture of academic integrity and high standards of writing and research,” said Daniel J. Bernardo, Washington State University provost and executive vice president.

Learn to use the tools

Faculty and graduate students may sign up for the one-year iThenticate pilot by sending an email with subject line “iThenticate” and name, email, department, college and campus to Mary F. Wack, vice provost for undergraduate education, at mwack@wsu.edu.

Users can self-train with the videos and other materials on the product website at http://www.ithenticate.com/training.

Turnitin is being integrated into WSU’s new learning management system, Blackboard Learn, for spring 2015 classes. Access through Blackboard will not require separate registration, and training will be integrated into Blackboard Learn training. Schedules are available through Global Campus trainings at http://elearning.wsu.edu/training_resources/training.aspx.

Users can find resources on the website at http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/getting-started. Turnitin training will begin in December; look for a schedule in WSU Announcements.

More about iThenticate

iThenticate compares faculty and graduate student work intended for publication or grant submission to more than 37 million published research articles from over 550 global scientific, technical and medical publishers – a cache larger than most university libraries maintain.

The software highlights material that matches documents found in its database so authors can verify that they have properly cited and/or phrased each match.

iThenticate compares work to 300,000 theses and dissertations via ProQuest. It maintains its own Web crawler, indexing more than 10 million Web pages daily and totaling over 43 billion Web pages.

Federal granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy use it to check incoming grant proposals. Medical research organizations, publishers and journal editors have embraced the use of this and similar originality verification software.

More about Turnitin

Turnitin is a set of tools for writing, editing, peer reviewing, checking accuracy of citation and helping faculty grade more efficiently and effectively.

Students can use it improve mechanics, grammar and basic style before submitting work. An instructor might enable the peer review feature, so writers gain feedback on larger issues of argumentation and structure as they revise. Students can do an originality check to see whether they have correctly cited material in their papers.

“When faculty spend less time on grammatical issues, they have more time to focus on and respond to the paper’s ‘big ideas,’” said regents professor Victor Villanueva, director of the Writing Program at WSU.

“I expect to see reports of plagiarism decline as students master these tools and take responsibility for verifying the originality of their work,” said Adam Jussel, director of student standards.

Faculty can engage in drag-and-drop commenting via icons, as well as popup comments embedded into a student’s paper. Voice annotation is available, as is grading offline using an iPad app.

Rubric tools can be integrated into grading. Students can be required to submit papers to the originality checker.

“I have great expectations that this tool, if proactively designed into course assignments, will allow students to turn in their best work and help both students and faculty uphold a culture of integrity,” said Wack.