Turnitin is an Internet-based service intended to help identify and prevent plagiarism cases.
As of Fall 2009-10, Turnitin at AUB will only be used through Moodle
AUB Student Code of Conduct outlines the policies related to the academic misconduct of cheating, plagiarism, and to a variety of academic and non-academic form of misconduct.
The AUB Student Handbook describes plagiarism as follows:
Plagiarism exists when students claim as their own the work of others. Students who fail to credit properly ideas or materials taken from another, commit plagiarism. Putting your name on a piece of work – any part of which is not yours – constitutes plagiarism, unless that piece is clearly marked and the work from which you have borrowed is fully identified. Plagiarism is a violation of the University’s academic regulations and is subject to disciplinary action.
The WWW/Internet has added a new dimension to the topic of plagiarism. By its nature of free, unlimited and unchecked access, it fosters anonymity, which some experts feel may lead to a lack of responsibility. This is particularly true on college campuses when the issue of plagiarism pops up at the time students are researching and writing term papers. The WWW/Internet is used extensively either through the Copy-Paste process or through the purchase of ready-made term papers on commercial sites.
Following is a description of Plagiarism
To plagiarize, according to Longman's Language Activator, is "to copy words, ideas, etc. from a book, article etc. written by someone else, and use them in your own work, pretending that you thought of them" (p. 272).
Plagiarism is very much older than the Internet. However, the ease of accessing all types of material over the Internet has revived in educational institutions the concern of students presenting plagiarized work in their courses. Before the Internet, students would plagiarize by manually copying from books or scholarly journals in the library. Since the mid-1990s texts can be transferred directly from Internet sources into a student's paper. Clearly, the Internet has made it easier for students to plagiarize, but it has also made it easier for instructors to identify plagiarism cases. As a teacher from Virginia pointed out, "Teachers are seeing more plagiarism partly because there is more, but partly because we can find it now" (Goot, 2002).
