http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12532877

I didn't know students had access to Turn It In. Do they?

I think you can get a student version, or ask another lecturer nicely if you can run it through with them. I'm definitely going to do it because my note taking is awful and there's bound to be bits that I thought I wrote on scraps of paper that were actually direct quotes or something.

Me too! I have been looking through notes I made before I was on maternity leave and some parts I have no idea whether I copied direct quotes or paraphrased - will have to go back and check everything! :-s

I'm not sure if I'd trust a computer program to tell me if I've plagiarised or not. There is of course a chance it might miss something that a human doesn't (as may have happened in this case).

That said, however, the idea that anyone will ever read my eventual thesis, outside of the examiners, is a bit of self-flattery!

I guess if you're going into politics you should definitely double-check your thesis.

Thanks for posting this. I came across Turn in it a while back but I have now made a note of it and will be running mine through it. I get a bit obsessive compulsive and spent some time after submitting my masters dissertation convinced something would go wrong and that I might have accidentally plagarised and that my career would be over (ridiculous and I'm not sure why I am admitting this!). Anyway, this should help with my peace of mind during what is bound to be a stressful time inbetween submission and viva.

Does anyone know if the 'Turn-it-in' software is safe to upload the thesis onto, ie I am worried about copyrights etc so wouldn't want my thesis being used by anyone else prior to my submission and defence. I am probably very paranoid about this as realistically who would want my thesis, let alone defend it lol.

That makes sense. Thanks for explaining Sneaks.

the 3-page pdf below sort of answers this question but not completely.

http://turnitin.com/static/pdf/us_Legal_Document.pdf

At the uni where I work we use it to educate students so they are encouraged (or mandated on some courses) to put work through turnitin - they get the chance to change it if the turnitin scores come out too high which encourages them to write in their own words (some get paranoid over a score of 10% while others think 65% is fine). I've just used it for an excercise on summarising journal articles where they were given an example which I had done so they can see how something translates from what they have read to writing in my own words.

Turnitin does keep all work though in its database (as I embarassingly found out when I used my MSc dissertation as an example having forgotten I had used it when I went on a turnitin training session - needless to say my dissertation came out as 100% PL!) but other people (apart from staff) can't see the files.

This is a good point Jepsonclough, if you use Turnitin for your own peace of mind prior to submission and then the uni puts the electronic version through as part of their plagiarism detection it would be a very high match!!!! I guess you would need to advice them that you have used the software previously and perhaps have a record of the originality report for the uni. An interesting issue though.

I also understand that a higher match will come out if the refs list is in the thesis as all of those will be matched, as will units of measurement and commonly used phrases such as 'a statistically signicificant increase was observed....' etc. So I guess the % match value is of less importance than the actual matched text.

The issue of confidentiality does seem to be an acceptable risk to the unis etc though, thanks Ady for that link (up)

You can tell it to ignore references and direct quotations which will reduce the percentage match but you do get used to looking and knowing what is or isn't reasonable. I've had reports which are less than 20% but are dodgy and others which are higher but are fine. It is a tool which requires some intelligence in using (but it is a great feeling when you get a zero score - which none of my students believed was actually possible until i showed them!)