McMaster Turnitin Guidelines
McMaster University approves the use of Turnitin.com for the following reasons:
- prevention – if students know their academic work is being checked for plagiarism, they will hopefully use proper citation methods
- protection of honest students and their work
- detection – with the type of technology in common use today, it is necessary to use a detection tool which checks academic work against the internet
Guidelines for the use of Turnitin.com
- papers should be submitted to Turnitin.com only with the student’s knowledge
- the instructor should indicate that Turnitin.com will be used in the course outline and/or on the assignment details
- the use of Turnitin.com cannot be mandatory*.
* Some students object to the use of Turnitin.com because of ownership issues. All work submitted to Turnitin.com becomes part of their database and is used to check authenticity of other student’s assignments. Some students object to their work being put in the database and others object to their work being used by Turnitin.com.
Approved by McMaster University Senate: April 13, 2005