The Use of Turnitin in the Higher Education Sector: uses, abuses and myths
Channel: e/merge Africa
Date: 2019-10-29

Presenters:

Sioux McKenna, Director of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies (CPGS), Rhodes University

Amanda Mphahlele, Lecturer, Department of Business Management, University of Johannesburg 

The misuse of text-matching software in universities actively encourages students to plagiarise. While there is no doubt that plagiarism needs to be addressed to maintain academic standards and to safeguard the integrity of the academic project, there is a significant misunderstanding about what text-matching technologies do. This presentation draws from Amanda’s PhD study and a number of co-publications that Amanda and Sioux have produced to look at how text-matching software has been understood across the South African higher education sector. An analysis of institutional policies from public universities across South Africa and interviews with members of institutional plagiarism committees reveals that technology is a key facet in these universities’ attempts to reduce the incidents of plagiarism and that Turnitin is the most favoured text-matching tool. However, the software is misunderstood to be a plagiarism detection tool and is used mainly for policing purposes, ignoring its educational potential for student development. These misunderstandings were found to direct students to behave in undesirable ways.