students at computer

Keywords: Turnitin, GradeMark, efficiency. 

Faculty: Education

Lecturer and researcher Donna Rooney initially started using Turnitin when she was a casual tutor for the Bachelor of Adult Education and the Bachelor of Arts in Organisational Learning. She had previously been copying and pasting phrases into Google that she thought might have been plagiarised, but this process was time-consuming. She found that Turnitin made originality checks relatively straightforward. Donna's marking workload increased considerably when she began teaching full-time, resulting in as many as 290 submissions to mark in the final week of session. To cope with the larger number of assignments, Donna began to use Turnitin for marking as well as monitoring for plagiarism. Donna felt that the time she took in setting up Turnitin for her classes paid off, especially as she improved gradually by using the program. She found that while her colleagues were still struggling with marking, she was getting incrementally faster and her students were still getting the feedback they needed to get better at the task for their next assignment. 

Assessment activity

Donna assesses a lot of first year, first session assignments from students who are new to academic writing. Her favourite feature of Turnitin GradeMark is the highlighter function, as it provides a quick way to draw a student’s attention to parts of the text that need to be fixed. Donna uses different colours so that all descriptive parts of the assignment are highlighted in one colour, and all of the analysis highlighted in a different colour. Students like the fact that this clearly points out which ideas have simply been added without any analysis. The highlighters can also highlight sections in the text that meet one of the assessment criteria. Donna sets up a rubric to reflect the criteria stated in the subject outline so students can track their progress against individual criteria. Once the criteria has been created, the rubrics are available for the next time you teach the subject or can be re-used in other subjects with modifications as necessary. There is also a series of pre-loaded feedback comments that can be used for multiple student papers. Not all of the comments are suitable for Donna’s marking, so she chooses those which suit the emphasis for the particular assignment. It is possible to highlight a whole paragraph and then drop a pre-formatted comment onto the whole paragraph, allowing the student to see both the comment and the section it refers to. Additionally, you can create a set of pre-loaded feedback comments that can be stored in the comments menu, ready to drag-and-drop for future assignments.    These functions are supported by the overall comment section, which Donna uses to make a few general comments as most of the feedback has been provided through the highlighter function and is associated with specific criteria. Donna feels that the voice comment recorder is particularly helpful because it adds a personal dimension to the feedback, which is an added bonus for distance education students who do not have classroom time with her. In her recorded comments, she adds feedback that is difficult to express through writing. The voice-recorder feature allocates two minutes of recording time, in which Donna finds it best to make recorded comments that support the relationship she has built up with her students over the session.

Benefits for staff and students

A major benefit of using Turnitin is that it speeds up the marking process, allowing Donna to efficiently provide specific feedback for each student on their work. These functions also provide a benefit to students, and Donna knows that they appreciate getting lots of feedback in different forms. Unlike paper-based assignments, Donna can draw on a variety of tools when marking assignments through Turnitin, such as the pre-loaded feedback comments. Features such as these take a lot of unnecessary work out of marking assignments - especially when you might have 30 assignment papers that contain similar mistakes, and therefore need similar feedback comments. 

Hints and advice

  • The combination of a marked-up paper, rubric and voice comments are what students really appreciate. 
  • When marking up the student paper use a variety of coloured highlighters, so that students get a clear picture of how to improve their work.
  • Give students a lot of detailed feedback on their first assessment task and then reduce the number of comments until their final assessment task has a few general observations.
  • Think of the time you put in setting up the system, like developing criteria, as an investment that pays off at the end just as other people start pulling their hair out under the pressure of end-of-session marking.

Photo credit: Chris Shain