Academic Integrity
Academic integrity underpins all aspects of higher education, including all activities relating to research, learning, assessment, and scholarship at Trinity. Academic integrity is a core feature of Trinity’s academic culture. Maintaining academic integrity involves a commitment to and demonstration of honest and moral behaviour in the academic setting.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is interpreted by the University as the act of presenting the work of others as one’s own work, without acknowledgement. Plagiarism is considered academic fraud. The University considers plagiarism to be a major offence, and subject to disciplinary procedures of the University. The University's full statement on plagiarism is set out in the University Calendar, Part I, 'General Regulations and Information', II, Academic progress, p63 - p71.
Where can my students find help with Academic Writing?
Ready Steady Write is a resource developed by Academic Practice and eLearning at Trinity College Dublin as a guide for students to help prevent plagiarism and develop academic writing skills and academic integrity, this is hosted by the library Ready Steady Write.
Developing your Academic Writing - A Handbook for Students is also available.
Tools to support and enhance Academic Integrity
Trinity offers TurnItIn to staff and students as a tool to support and enhance academic integrity. TurnItIn can also be used to streamline the assessment and feedback process (e.g. enabling paperless marking). TurnItIn is integrated into the College VLE. Students can use TurnItIn to submit assignments within the Blackboard VLE online. Teaching staff can use TurnItIn to provide multimodal feedback on assignments in a range of ways, e.g. using annotations, rubrics, voice recordings and text.
Support for academic staff using TurnItIn within Blackboard is available from IT Services and quick-start resource guides are available below. High originality report scores might, for example, indicate a piece of work with a very high citation incidence as opposed to highlighting a piece of work that risks underacknowledging ideas or sources.
TurnItIn is not an ‘failproof’ plagiarism checker, but one tool to support academic integrity. TurnItIn ‘Originality Reports’ compare student submissions against constantly updated databases. These can support educators to be aware of improper citation and/or potential risks of illegitimate collusion or plagiarism. Every Originality Report provides instructors with the opportunity to teach their students proper citation methods as well as to safeguard their students’ academic integrity. The source databases against which student work is compared includes unoriginal material from over 40 million student papers, 12 billion webpages, over 10,000 newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals and thousands of books.
Turnitin information & Guides for Staff
Online Assessment Hilary and Trinity Term 2021 Staff Guides
Turnitin has now been integrated within Blackboard. Using Turnitin within Blackboard is the recommended and supported method for creating Turnitin assignments for your students.
IT Services recommends that staff create assignments using Turnitin via Blackboard rather than Turnitin.com. Using Turnitin via Blackboard means that students & staff no longer have to set up accounts with Turnitin.com or manage Join codes - this is all done automatically through Blackboard providing an improved user experience. They have created online guides to help staff move from using Turnitin.com to using it via Blackboard. If you have a query regarding Turnitin.com or need help moving to using Turnitin via Blackboard, please email IT services via itservicedesk@tcd.ie.
Please note most importantly, if you are going to run your students papers through Turnitin, the student must be informed in advance about the product and its intended use by you, the lecturer.