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Comments Feed Exploring research-led teaching at Senate Training and support for postgraduate students who teach (PGWT) alternate alternate University of Edinburgh logo Teaching Matters blog Promoting, discussing and celebrating teaching at the University of Edinburgh Menu Skip to content * Home * About * Contributors * Videos * Browse by theme + Academic and personal support + Academic communities + Assessment and Feedback + Curriculum development + Digital education and online and distance learning + Experiential learning and community engagement + Learning environments + Student employability and career development + Student-led learning + Supporting staff development in learning and teaching + Understanding and supporting diversity and inclusion * Browse by School/Centre + Business School + Careers Service + Deanery of Biomedical Sciences + Deanery of Clinical Sciences + Deanery of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences + Edinburgh College of Art + Edinburgh Law School + Edinburgh Medical School + EUSA + Institute for Academic Development + Learning Teaching and Web + Moray House School of Education + Office of Life Long Learning + Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies + School of Biological Sciences + School of Chemistry + School of Divinity + School of Economics + School of Engineering + School of Geosciences + School of Health in Social Sciences + School of History, Classics and Archaeology + School of Informatics + School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures + School of Mathematics + School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences + School of Physics and Astronomy + School of Social and Political Science + Student Disability Service * Twitter * Instagram * YouTube 27th July 20175th September 2017IAD user Guarding against PhD Plagiarism – an unmet need? PhD nightmare crop Poor academic practice and academic misconduct cases are much more visible and frequent among taught undergraduate and postgraduate assessment than they are in PhD work. However cases do occur and the consequences are potentially catastrophic and extremely distressing for all concerned. Cases we are aware of have involved the external examiner identifying plagiarised material with an almost forensic level of rigor – exactly what we expect of any external examiners doing their job. It has struck us that there is currently an unmet need to help protect students and supervisory staff from this occurring in the first place. This academic year we have piloted the use of Turnitin in the School of Education to screen PhD work at four points in the PhD lifecycle. The time points are; Pre-supervision 1. PhD Proposal Not saved in Turnitin repository During Supervision 2. Year 1 progression paper 3. Completed manuscript version (pre-submission) Post-PhD 4. Final accepted version of thesis Saved in Turnitin repository In this role Turnitin is not primarily intended as a deterrent or as evidence for academic misconduct investigations. Instead it provides information for supervisory teams to use as part of the research training process for the students they supervise. Use of Turnitin in this way should help; * Alert supervisors to poor scholarship habits in new postgraduates arriving at Edinburgh, and * Protect against problematic student work leaving the university destined for external examiners and the wider academic community. Our pilot of this approach has already proved valuable by identifying patterns of poor scholarship including plagiarism among year 1 progression papers; issues we have identified would definitely land students in trouble if they had submitted work for UG or taught PG assessments. We then alerted the supervisory teams to these observations so that the student practices and understanding can be addressed at the supervisory level. PhD Supervisors found this useful “…very helpful indeed…… forewarned is forearmed.” We would urge great caution if supervisors are tempted to use ad hoc Turnitin dropboxes to ‘see what is happening’ in their doctoral students’ work; it is important that drafts of PhD work are not saved to the Turnitin student repository as this interferes with future similarity checking. Instead, organising these efforts within PhD programmes at School level involving the School Academic Misconduct officer (SAMO), may be the best way forward. If the SAMO, as well as the supervisors, view submissions this would ensure a uniform level of scrutiny. This is simple to do, uses existing resources and involves little effort. This approach may help ‘nip in the bud’ problematic studying and writing habits which may be really difficult to spot without the help of Turnitin. Undetected problems could persist within a final submitted thesis and this could be catastrophic; in 2013 the Education Minister for Germany had their PhD rescinded because of plagiarised content. PhD theses are still a special case and the nature of similarity needs to be interpreted from an academic perspective. It is common for students to publish sections of their work and in these cases a degree of similarity between thesis chapters and published material is inevitable. Next steps: Find out more about using Turnitin at the University of Edinburgh Read the Teaching Matters post on Improving Academic Practice with Turnitin Dave Saunders Dave is Programme Director for BMedSci(Hons) Sport Science Medicine and previously Programme Director for BSc(Hons) Applied Sport Science at the Moray House School of Education. Dave is also the School Academic Misconduct Officer for the School of Education (dave.saunders@ed.ac.uk). Tonks Fawcett Tonks is the Professor of Student Learning for Nurse Education in the School of Health in Social Science and the Associate Dean Student Conduct for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science (T.Fawcett@ed.ac.uk). Share this: * Twitter * Email * Facebook * Reddit * LinkedIn * Tumblr * Print * * Academic and personal support * Assessment and Feedback * Dave Saunders * Digital education and online and distance learning * Moray House School of Education * School of Health in Social Sciences * Tonks Fawcett * academic support * assessment * feedback * learning technology * PGR * supervision Post navigation Previous Exploring research-led teaching at Senate Next Training and support for postgraduate students who teach (PGWT) Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. 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