1. What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is the global leader in evaluating and improving student writing. The company’s cloud-based service for originality checking, online grading and peer review saves instructors time and provides rich feedback to students. One of the most widely distributed educational applications in the world, Turnitin is used by more than 10,000 institutions in 126 countries to manage the submission, tracking and evaluation of student papers online.

2. How does Turnitin work?

Institutions license Turnitin on an annual basis. The institutions are encouraged to communicate with students about their use of Turnitin and how their academic integrity policies work. An instructor sets up a class and an assignment in the Turnitin service. Students or instructors then submit papers to Turnitin via file upload or cut-and-paste. Turnitin consists of three core tools: OriginalityCheck®, GradeMark® and PeerMark®. OriginalityCheck compares the paper’s text to a vast database of 24+ billion pages of digital content (including archived Internet content that is no longer available), over 250 million papers in the student archive, and 120,000+ professional, academic and commercial journals and publications. The software is regularly updated with new content acquired through new partnerships. For example, Turnitin partner CrossRef boasts 500‐plus members that include publishers such as Elsevier and the IEEE, and has already added hundreds of millions of pages of new content to our database. Turnitin offers institutions a wide variety of flexible options for handling students’ submissions including options that let students choose to keep their papers in an institution-only private zone. Once assured of the paper’s originality, instructors use GradeMark to provide rich feedback using drag-and-drop marks, voice comments, and rubrics. ETS® e-rater® technology is integrated with GradeMark to identify spelling, grammar, mechanics, usage and style errors so instructors can focus on providing more substantive feedback. Instructors can track student views of the graded paper, customize and share comments and rubrics, track grades using a grade book, and assess students over time.

3. Is Turnitin available in multiple languages

Turnitin is a global company that does business across the world. Turnitin currently offers interfaces and content matching for OriginalityCheck and GradeMark in English (Americas and UK), Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch. The service will soon support Finnish, English (Australia), English (India), English (Portugal), Italian and Arabic. The vision of Turnitin is to make the process of evaluating and grading written assignments completely paperless, and give faculty worldwide more time and energy to do what they do best—teach students.

4. Where can I learn more about plagiarism, Turnitin origanality checking and Turnitin writing solution?

Visit plagiarism.org or the Turnitin website page for more information.

For undergraduate students in UTM, you must be feeling ‘meh’ when starting to do your final year project (FYP) aka Projek Sarjana Muda (PSM).

When your SV starts to ask you to find the literature review of some topics, sometimes you will get really blur of “how are you going to start? what kind of reading you should look at”

and what actually should you looking for”. Dont you worry because you must find it normal for most of FYP students to kind of feel difficult to start your project.

So actually, when your appointed SVs asked you to start your project, do not ger nervous. There are so many online trusted website that you could refer to download journals related to your

project. Remeber….you are now in the midst of doing research..Thus, the reading must be from indexed journals…avoid referring to magazines, newspapers or maybe ‘entertainment blog’.

This is time to get serious :)…so first, make sure discuss the research topic with your SV, then start with doing your literature review…you can download your reading materials from https://www.scopus.com/ or https://www.google.com/#q=sciencedirect. The access is free as long as you are in UTM and if happened that you are going for semester break in your hometown, you can actually still download the journals by inserting your ACID via PSZ website.

So I hope my sharing today is kind of beneficial for some who still ponder of how to start your FYP. Good luck to you 🙂

Congratulation to my Master student for finishing her Master degrees today. She passed the viva voce this moring and I am very happy and proud of her. She will go to Canada to follow her husband who has being offered a postdoctoral position in Ottawa University. Dear Maryam, congrats on your achievement and thank you for your trust to appoint me as your co-sv :).

Maryam is wearing our traditional baju kurung. She baught the nice kurung specially for this viva defend :)..unfortunately her main SV, Prof Dr Ahmad Fauzi Ismail is not in the picture since he had to left early due to his other commitment as Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research of UTM.