University Exams
Hope University followed suit in September last year.
Around 1,000 students from a raft of courses piloted the scheme, which is set to be rolled out across all departments in September.
Although cases of plagiarism in 2008/9 stand at 100 – nineteen more than in 2007/8 – cases are expected to drop once the system beds in.
Tessa Owens, a principal lecturer at Hope, said: “A lot of students’ plagiarism is innocent.
“For example, they may be quoting something and forget to put it in quotation marks. This will be flagged up by the software.
“Of course, there are students who blatantly have not done any of their own work, but they now know this will be picked up and not tolerated.”
But Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, which pushes for better standards in education, said: “University students should know cutting and pasting other people’s work and passing it off as their own is wrong, without a computer telling them. They will be marking their own exams next.”
Liverpool John Moores university last night confirmed it was also trying out two Turnitin schemes, “one which uses the software as a detection service and the other which permits students to use the software as a tool to learn how to correctly reference their work”.
