At Jamia, software to detect plagiarism in student projects

In a bid to check plagiarism and encourage students to submit original assignments, Jamia Millia Islamia has introduced a software named ‘Turnitin’ that will scan all research documents and assignments.

In a bid to check plagiarism and encourage students to submit original assignments, Jamia Millia Islamia has introduced a software named ‘Turnitin’ that will scan all research documents and assignments.

University officials on Tuesday said they hoped that with this move, students were encouraged to submit original work, especially for class assignments.

“This will help faculty members to check any kind of plagiarism not just in PhD research but also in assignments of undergraduate and postgraduate students. More often than not, students just copy-paste from the internet for their assignments; the originality is lost. We will now ensure that such cases do not happen,” the university’s officiating vice chancellor, SM Sajid, told HT.

While text within quotes will be exempted, students, especially PhD scholars, have to be cautious about citations.

“Many a time, people forget to mention citations in their research papers. This will show the percentage of the text that has been borrowed from external sources and the faculty will go through the document to check its authenticity and verify what parts are quoted text and what parts have been plagiarised,” Sajid added.

While this is primarily being seen as a deterrent, experts said this would be used to run ongoing research work through the scanner so as to make necessary changes before final submission.

“This has already been tested on some MPhil students and it has helped them a great deal. They ran their research through this scanner and found that there were some parts that could have spelt trouble for them. So, not only will this be a deterrent, students will be more certain of their work. We are ironing out some final things so that even if students change the font or juggle words around, the software is still able to detect any remote resemblance to the original text,” said S Kazim Naqvi, additional director, FTK Centre for Information Technology at Jamia.