Submitting a Report to Turnitin
Turnitin is a program designed to detect copying within papers. It is an anti-plagiarism
program. A key objective of 2240L is to teach students how not to plagiarize and how to
properly site reference sources. Turnitin compares submitted papers to books, magazines, online sites, and previously submitted papers from both XULA and schools across the world.
In CHEM 2240L, we want you to learn from your mistakes, and hence allow students to
fix and re-submit papers up to the final deadline. If a final paper is submitted, with material
copied from another source without referencing, this is plagiarism. In this event, a zero will be
given for that lab report assignment and an Academic Misconduct Report will be filed with the
CAS Dean. A zero obtained due to academic misconduct issues will not be dropped.
Submission Procedures
Save completed report on your computer. Enter Blackboard and go to the 2240L course
page. On the left hand side main menu box, click "Turnitin assignments". On the next page
click the title of the report you are submitting. The first report will be "Dehydration of
Cyclohexanol". Choose single file upload. Under author scroll down and select your name. Add
a title. Click browse, find and select the file of your report previously saved on your computer.
Select upload. View the page then select submit. You will get an electronic receipt.
Look at your originality percent! (You may have to exit Blackboard, wait a few
minutes and then re-enter blackboard to be able to see this.) Click on the number of the
originality percent to open the paper and view possible originality issues.
Pay close attention if the color of the percent is not green or the number is greater than
~20%. Examine the originality report any sentence which is similar (or identical) to a sentence in
any other source, will be highlighted. Examine these highlights one by one. Ignore simple
sentences in which everyone will have written something very similar like “0.75 mL of 2methylcyclohexanol were added”. Nearly all of the students will have a similar sentence
because that is what we all did. If instead you see “Dehydration of an alcohol to form an alkene
is one of the fundamental reactions of organic chemistry” as highlighted than you had better
take note. This sentence was taken verbatim from the Lab Manual. You need to either remove
the sentence, rewrite it in your own words, or put quotes around it with a number at the end
which corresponds to the reference of the lab manual including the page from which it was
taken.
Once you have fixed all possible plagiarism (copying) issues in your paper, resave it and
resubmit it following the above instructions to Turnitin. After one paper is submitted, it may
take up to 24 hours before a resubmitted paper can be viewed for originality.
Your instructor will be checking originality reports of each final paper. In this course we
want students to check themselves, correct themselves, learn how not to plagiarize and avoid
academic misconduct problems. If you have any questions or problems, please ask your
instructor.
Here is a short video that shows the steps within Turnitin.
http://turnitin.com/en_us/training/student-training/submitting-a-paper
Here is another video showing how to find the assignment within Blackboard.
http://ondemand.blackboard.com/students.htm
Good Luck.