Faculty
Turnitin Plagiarism Prevention Pilot
WMU has adopted the Turnitin Plagiarism Prevention software since the Fall 2005 semester.
Turnitin was created in 1996 by a group of professors from the University of California Berkeley who were concerned with the rise of Internet plagiarism. Turnitin allows the student or educator to upload a paper into the Turnitin database, where software will then use algorithms to create “digital fingerprints” that can identify similar patterns in text. Then the paper is matched to billions of web pages, paper mill essays, and student papers submitted online. In an hour or less, Turnitin creates an “originality report” that highlights any passages from the paper that might not be authentic, and lists web sites and other resources with content that matches that in the paper.
