IS 6100 midterm grading and how TurnItIn.com works

As I men­tioned yes­ter­day, I’m still grad­ing the IS 6100 midterm exams. I should fin­ish these by Mon­day.

Stu­dents should not be con­cerned if their TurnItIn.com orig­i­nal­ity score for this assign­ment changes dur­ing my grad­ing. As the instruc­tor, I can rerun an orig­i­nal­ity analy­sis to exclude the ref­er­ence list. I can also choose to exclude any sec­tions that the stu­dent put in quo­ta­tion marks (“”), which are usu­ally reserved for direct quotes from another source.

I use these two fea­tures a lot when I grade. The abil­ity to exclude direct quotes is very help­ful for me. Keep in mind that I almost always advise stu­dents to use their own words, and avoid quot­ing directly from the text­book. A direct quote demon­strates lit­tle more than the abil­ity find a sec­tion and type it in accurately.

Ref­er­ence lists usu­ally pro­duce false pos­i­tives, because a prop­erly for­mat­ted ref­er­ence to the text­book should be almost iden­ti­cal in most stu­dents papers.

TurnItIn.com works very well as a deter­rent against shar­ing
or sub­mit­ting assign­ments
that stu­dents been found on other com­put­ers, email or the inter­net. As I
wrote in my syl­labus, I assume that most grad­u­ate stu­dents are adults
and will act hon­or­ably. I don’t use TurnItIn.com as a “gotcha” tool to trap students.

Some stu­dents have asked why their orig­i­nal­ity scores changed before the assign­ment was due. I always set up my TurnItIn.com assign­ment so that every sub­mis­sion is rean­a­lyzed any time a new sub­mis­sion is made. This step helps pro­tect stu­dents who sub­mit­ted their assign­ments early, because any new sub­mis­sions will be ana­lyzed against the pre­vi­ous sub­mis­sions as well as TurnItIn.com’s vast database.

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