News & Releases

"How Original" - The Founding of Turnitin

As published in The Biochemist - December 2008

"Earlier in life, I never would have imagined myself as the world’s plagiarism authority. I didn’t have any particular axe to grind with cheating students. My goals as an early academic had nothing to do with plagiarism or plagiarists, but my experiences during that time brought myself and some colleagues to the point where we have revolutionized how education works..." (more)

Turnitin WriteCycle Wins Best Education Solution Award at Education Computing Organization of Ontario’s Annual Conference; Web-Based Instructional Tool Improves Student Writing

OAKLAND, California — Dec. 1, 2008 — The new Turnitin WriteCycle™ suite, a 100-percent digital workflow solution aimed at improving student writing by improving the feedback process, is the winner of the “Best Education Solution” award given by The Educational Computing Organization of Ontario (ECOO) at its annual conference held Nov. 13-14 in Ontario, Canada. The award recognizes WriteCycle as the best overall education technology solution for 2008. It is one of three ECOO Vendor Excellence Awards recognizing outstanding contributions of education industry leaders in demonstrating their commitment to excellence and innovation in education.

iParadigms and CrossRef Receive Publishing Innovation Award From Largest Trade Association of Scholarly and Professional Publishers

OAKLAND, California—Sept. 29, 2008—iParadigms®, LLC, the leader in the field of textual intellectual property protection, today announced that CrossCheck powered by iThenticate™ is the recipient of the Publishing Innovation Award from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the largest trade association of scholarly and professional publishers. “Recognition by ALPSP is an honor on an international scale,” said John M. Barrie, Ph.D, president and CEO of iParadigms. “This award raises awareness of CrossCheck powered by iThenticate, and signals publishers that CrossRef is offering members a recognized, innovative tool that is on its way to becoming a highly-valued service to the publishing world.”

iParadigms continues to add content through partnerships with groups such as CrossRef, which so far has added nearly five million pages of new content to its databases. More content will be added as new CrossRef members choose to implement CrossCheck powered by iThenticate.

"We are really thrilled to receive the ALPSP Publishing Innovation Award for CrossCheck,” said Ed Pentz, executive director of CrossRef. “The service is already off to a great start, and this recognition further confirms the innovative power of the CrossRef model as a way to support our members.”

Turnitin Forms Alliance with Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals to Offer All State Secondary Schools Access to New Instructional Tool for Writing

OAKLAND CA, September 22, 2008 - Turnitin today announced an alliance with the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals (MASSP) to offer each of the state's high schools and middle schools a low-cost option to purchase Turnitin's new instructional tool, WriteCycle™.

WriteCycle is a 100%, digital workflow solution consisting of three interconnected services that help students better engage with their courses, instructors and peers. Turnitin's leading originality checking and plagiarism protection service helps students and teachers identify various forms of plagiarism and correct the problems. GradeMark™, a digital markup system, frees instructors from hand-grading papers, allowing them more time to give each student valuable and frequent feedback; and Peer Review helps students become invested in their work, and the work of others.

"Michigan places strong emphasis on preparing a highly skilled workforce, especially in the face of diminishing manufacturing jobs," said MASSP's Executive Director Jim Ballard. "Writing is an essential skill underscored by the inclusion of the ACT Plus™ Writing test into the Michigan Merit Exam required for all students in grade 11, which assesses skills for high school English and entry-level college composition courses. This alliance is an important step in providing our high schools with a way to improve student writing across the curriculum."

MASSP approached Turnitin after a board member suggested the service as a way of preparing students for high stakes writing exams, and ultimately, improving Adequate Yearly Progress. After reviewing the benefits of WriteCycle, the board asked Turnitin for a proposal that could pave the way for widespread adoption of WriteCycle. The alliance with Turnitin enables MASSP to offer special pricing for the service to their members.

"This alliance is an example of how business and education can work together to make sure students are prepared for a 21st century workforce," said Katie Povejsil, vice president of marketing at Turnitin. "It's an innovative way to do business, and one we hope will be a model to other educational organizations. Turnitin is also developing ways to help educators use WriteCycle to improve academic performance on writing-intensive assignments in any subject area."

Turnitin Goes Global

August 2008 - Turnitin can now accept papers for originality checking in 30 different languages including Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, Korean and Thai. These new languages join the languages that have been previously supported by Turnitin: French, Spanish and German.

John Barrie, CEO of iParadigms said, "Recent changes to our technological platform allow us to handle submissions in a wide range of alphabets and character sets. Originality reports in alphabetic languages such as Spanish will exhibit perfect fidelity with regard to accents and diacritical marks, and support for character-based languages have opened many new global possibilities for us. We are working with our partners on fully localized interfaces to be available soon."

Papers can now be submitted to Turnitin at turnitin.com in the following 30 languages: Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Thai, Korean, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmal, Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish.

For more information about global coverage, please contact us via email at sales@turnitin.com or via telephone at +1-510-287-9720 (US).

New Turnitin Look and Feel

Since the web evolves exponentially, web sites quickly become outdated in just a couple of years. As such, Turnitin itself was in dire need of an updated interface, so we recently underwent a complete over-haul.

The new Turnitin was launched to all Turnitin customers in the US, EU and Canada as of August 7th, 2008. The new interface has been in Beta testing since April, 2008, with feedback from thousands of users incorporated into the new design. Made to be easier on the eyes and easier to use, many users have already switched to the new interface exclusively and love the new look and feel of their Turnitin service.

Although some of the functionality has changed, the new interface runs smoother and faster, and works more intuitively. Instead of the cramped interface of the old-school Turnitin, the New Turnitin's spaciousness makes it more readable than before. The importance of increased readability in the new look is evident with the font sizing options that range from small, medium, to large. These options can be toggled at any time to suit personal viewing preferences.

We've also improved tools for setting up and managing courses and assignments. The tools are great for managing courses and the entire workflow process. Use our completely redesigned calendar to stay organized by setting dates, goals and deadlines.

GradeBook also had a makeover, and can still be used as an online grade book that easily exports to excel. The instructor inbox and student portfolio have been improved to help you manage all your important documents and student progress over time. Turnitin's discussion boards have been redesigned to provide a richer user interface, and a more enjoyable collaborative learning experience.

Please note that we're giving users the option of switching back to the old version using a link that will appear at the top of their Turnitin account. This option will be available until early 2009. If you have any questions regarding using Turnitin, or the new interface, please contact the Turnitin Help Desk.

To help customers learn to get the most out of the new interface, our training department will be hosting weekly WebEx sessions throughout the Fall. For information regarding attending one of these sessions, or to have a session specially tailored for your institution's training needs, please contact your Turnitin sales representative.

Judge Dismisses Copyright Infringement Complaint Against iParadigms, Provider of Turnitin.com

OAKLAND CA, March 18, 2008 - iParadigms LLC, provider of Turnitin.com and iThenticate, announced that a Virginia judge has issued a summary judgment regarding his dismissal of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by four high school students against iParadigms over the use of the students' written works in the Turnitin plagiarism detection service.

The judge stated that iParadigms' use of archived student works to assess originality of newly-submitted papers constitutes a fair use under US copyright law and is therefore not copyright infringement. In addition, he states that such use "provides a substantial public benefit through the network of institutions using Turnitin".

iParadigms' CEO John Barrie said "The Turnitin service was created because of the pressing educational need from institutions to help students learn to produce original written work - especially in our "cut and paste" digital world. The judge has validated that our service is able to do so without infringing the copyrights of students' work."

U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton said that "though iParadigms makes a profit in providing this service to educational institutions, its use of student works adds "a further purpose or different character" to the works." Such "transformative" works do not violate fair use. Further, because student works become part of the database against which other students' work is compared, Turnitin helps protect the papers from being exploited by others who might profitably claim them as their own work.

Welcome To the New GradeMark!

This latest GradeMark upgrade delivers highly anticipated features as well as speed, stability, and loading enhancements. We encourage all of our users to take advantage of the new GradeMark.

Changes include:

New, adjustable QuickMark palette
The QuickMark palette can now be resized and will remember its size, placement, and open QuickMark sets from use to use.

New QuickMark symbol color
QuickMark symbols will now appear in dark orange to increase visibility against the black text of students' papers.

Rich text editing in General comments
General comments will now support bold, italic, and underlined text styles. Instructors are now also able to include hyperlinks in their General comments.

Simplified timeout recovery
If your browser loses connection to the internet for any reason, GradeMark will now notify you and allow you to sign back into grading by simply entering your password.

Enhanced navigation between papers
If you click on another paper in your inbox while GradeMark is open, GradeMark will automatically jump to that paper for grading. In addition, clicking on your browser's forward and back buttons will allow you to move to the next and previous papers in your assignment inbox.

Memory for tools
GradeMark will now remember what tool you used last and will automatically switch to that tool when you open the program. It will also remember and load the last color you chose for a tool when you switch to using that tool.

For more information regarding using the new GradeMark, please refer to the training video and user manuals listed below:

• GradeMark Training Video
• Instructor User Manual
• Student User Manual