The University of Southampton

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Academic Integrity Tutorial

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Plagiarism Detection

Slide 12/17

All work handed in electronically can be submitted to TurnitIn (http://turnitin.com/) which compares your work against all other submitted assignments, and over 20 billion webpages and publications. This comes back with an ‘originality report’ which highlights suspicious text.

A Fictional Case Study

An Example Report by Angela Brown

This is a short example to show the importance of using your own words in the reports that you write. Here is an additional sentence with a long and unusual structure in it that will definitely be tracked as a distinctive item by the plagiarism detection software that we use.

This is my own work (signed) Angela Brown.

The Case Study Continued

An Example Report by Cheating Dastard

Another student has copied Angela’s report, without any reference to the original work. This is a short example to show the importance of using your own words in the reports that you write. Here is an additional sentence with a long and unusual structure in it that will definitely be tracked as a distinctive item by the plagiarism detection software that we use. To make the report a little longer, some material has been included from another source off the Internet.

An Example Plagiarism Report

-Overall Similarity Index: 71%

1.38% match (internet, wikipedia)

2.33% match (student papers from 06/16/06)

An Example Report by Cheating Dastard

Another student has copied Angela’s report, without any reference to the original work. This is a short example to show the importance of using your own words in the reports that you write. Here is an additional sentence with a long and unusual structure in it that will definitely be tracked as a distinctive item by the plagiarism detection software that we use.

To make the report a little longer, some material has been included from another source off the Internet. Integrity comprises the personal inner sense of “wholeness” deriving from honesty and consistent uprightness of character. The etymology of the word relates it to the Latin adjective integer (whole, complete). Evaluators, of course, usually assess integrity from some point of view, such as that of a given ethical tradition or in the context of an ethical relationship. This is my own work (signed) Cheating Dastard.

Actual Screenshot