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Independent review brings Turnitin out on top An independent report released today confirms why Turnitin is used by over 90% of Universities in the UK, a growing number of FE colleges, and increasingly by Awarding Bodies as a means of validating pupils’ work in the schools sector. The report conducted by the NCC Group shows that Turnitin scores consistently high against a wide range of criteria, therefore revalidating the findings of the initial review of plagiarism detection software. It was on this basis that JISC endorsed Turnitin and the software was made available to UK HE and FE institutions. The review began with the evaluation of eleven plagiarism detection solutions progressing onto an in-depth study of Turnitin and four other systems. The 14 categories against which the five solutions were evaluated are diverse; ranging from Configuration and Usability through to Legal Considerations and Privacy. Turnitin scored highest in all categories, far surpassing the other four systems on the Databases Searched, Configuration and Stability of Product and Support categories. To summarise the findings of the NCC Group; Turnitin was considered to be a “top scoring suite” and “the most capable service provider”(Scaife 2007). Undoubtedly the Turnitin service is greatly enhanced by access to a comprehensive support infrastructure which includes a dedicated telephone and email helpdesk managed by Northumbria Learning. Guidance on integrating plagiarism detection software into assessment processes and institutional policies and procedures for plagiarism prevention is also provided by the JISC-iPAS, and underpinned by an enthusiastic user group and forum membership. Development of Turnitin is constantly evolving based on feedback provided by its users not only in the UK, but also internationally. Planned changes in the future will see improvements to the web crawler that will mean that the currency of ever-changing sites will be improved, search times reduced, and accuracy increased by the introduction of a distributed architecture and improved algorithm. Also, at the request of many UK users, deeper integration with all VLEs, including Blackboard and Moodle is being developed. The full report can be found at http://www.jiscpas.ac.uk/nccgroupreport.php ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ ************************************************************************* You are subscribed to the JISC Plagiarism mailing list. To Unsubscribe, change your subscription options, or access list archives, visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/PLAGIARISM.html *************************************************************************