Abstract
This paper reports on an initiative in the communication course of a
business degree program jointly run by Taylors University College,
Malaysia and the University of South Australia. The innovation was
designed to assist students understand academic integrity and avoid
inadvertent plagiarism. The text-matching software program Turnitin
was used in a student-centred way, to enable students to take
responsibility for ensuring that their essays were not plagiarised.
Students were required to submit a draft of their essay to Turnitin, and
use the Originality Report to make revisions as necessary, prior to
formal submission of the assignment. The findings demonstrate that
this initiative resulted in second submissions with lower percentage
text-matches, a reduced number of plagiarism cases, and students’
evaluations that suggest an increased understanding of academic
integrity issues.
This paper was submitted to the International Integrity & Plagiarism Conference which ran between 2004-2014. The paper was peer reviewed by an independent editorial board and features in the conference proceedings.