Technology for Promoting Academic Integrity: The Impact of Using Turnitin on Reducing Plagiarism

Despite the compelling fact that the World Wide Web has brought an enormous amount of data to the distance of a person’s fingertips, it has also made it easier than before for students to breach academic integrity. The growing challenge of plagiarism in education has triggered the production of several plagiarism detection software programs such as Turnitin. Since it was released, there has been a lot of debate in literature on whether or not the integration of such software in college education does tangibly enhance academic integrity practices by students. The current study builds upon existing literature by seeking to find out whether the use of Turnitin has an influence on the students’ commitment to academic integrity practices. It also explores the students’ perspectives on what skill areas they need support with in order to avoid breaching academic integrity principles. To that end, a group of college students (n=53) were asked to submit two different assignments. The first one was assigned before the integration of Turnitin into the assignment submission platform. The second was assigned through Turnitin, and the instructor provided an explanation to the students on how to avoid plagiarism, and underscored the university policy in this regard. The results indicated that there has been a drop in the students’ incidents of plagiarism. Moreover, the students indicated that the use of the software should be accompanied by hands-on education on the best practices of academic integrity and research writing by their professors.