SF State faculty and students will once again have access to a tool to help them identify plagiarized work.

The detection tool, Turnitin, compares student work to a database of Web content and papers from term paper mills as well as papers that have been submitted by students in the past.

SF State faculty members, led by English department lecturer Amy Love, petitioned successfully to bring Turnitin back this semester.

Love resists the idea that Turnitin is purely a means to catch students in a lie.

“We all know that some people cheat, but most students’ errors come from things that are teachable-- like correct citation forms,” Love said.

Students will submit their papers online through Blackboard and iLearn. They then receive a report flagging specific areas of concern.

Students can use the tool preemptively to confirm that they haven’t inadvertently lifted language during their research and that sources are correctly cited before turning in a final version of their work.

“Turnitin is like spell check for your citations,” she said.

The tool is not new to SF State. The California State University system has contracted with the makers of Turnitin, iParadigms of Oakland, since 2002.

But SF State opted to discontinue its license, in part, because of the expense. SF State will pay $19,739 this year for the license to make Turnitin available on campus.

It is difficult to gauge the prevalence of plagiarism on campus.

“I get reports of somewhere between 20 and 40 cases every semester,” said Elise Wormuth, dean of the college of humanities. But Wormuth only receives reports from within the humanities department.

“I think a fair amount goes unreported,” she added.

Although every class must have a syllabus outlining what the university calls “a statement of academic integrity,” different departments deal with plagiarism issues on a case-by-case basis. That might now be changing.

In the past, when Wormuth received a report of plagiarism, she was free to use her own discretion about whether to forward the case to the Judicial Affairs Officer or not. But the Chancellor’s Office is now making that reporting mandatory.

The Judicial Affairs Officer and the university’s president are the only people authorized to take punitive action such as academic probation or expulsion against a student.

The Turnitin plagiarism detection tool will be available for all faculty members to use, but it is not mandatory that they use it.

Tiffany Fox is a lecturer at SF State teaching a lower-division English class this semester. She doesn’t think she’ll be using Turnitin in her classes.

“It might be my own overconfidence, but I’d like to believe I know my student’s writing so well that I could recognize plagiarized work on my own,” she said.

Fox does admit a level of concern that students might be plagiarizing and hasn’t ruled out the use of Turnitin in some capacity in the future. But for now, she’s relying on her instincts and the honor system.

“I would hate to make it a requirement because I want to establish an expectation of trust with my students.”