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 I 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 useful to work your way through.
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 Students
- Quick Guide to Turnitin in Blackboard for Students
- Interpreting the Turnitin Similarity Report
- Viewing Instructor Feedback
- Turnitin Support Wizard
Submission Issues: if you have issues submitting your assignment, please contact your instructor. IT Services cannot reset your submission; this needs to be done by the instructor in the first instance and they can contact IT Services if they encounter an issue.
File Limits & File Types: the maximum file size supported by Turnitin is approximately 100mb and the maximum paper length is approximately 800 pages. More details including supported file types are available on the Turnitin website.
Viewing Your Originality Report: Your instructor controls whether or not the originality report is available to view before the due date. If the report says 'Pending' please return to the file at a later stage - typically around an hour after first submitting but this can vary depending on the file size or whether it is a busy period. Resubmission reports can take up to 24 hours to generate (or longer if there is an issue with the paper or the Turnitin service) - please ensure you leave plenty of time before submitting. IT Services have no control over how long these reports take to appear. Please check with your instructor if you are unsure what options are available to you.
Submitting via Blackboard: if you are submitting your assignment via Turnitin in Blackboard, you do not need to create a Turnitin account. Do not create a Turnitin account or login via Turnitin.com - instead submit your assignment via Blackboard and save the receipt once you have submitted. Please see our Quick Guide or video on how to submit your assignment.