Turnitin Summit EMEA virtual event was held across two days November 2-3, 2022. The summit focused on student success, academic integrity, and supercharging assessment with:
- Best practice and case study from Kings College London institution
- Enhancing the student experience – an academic and a student view
- Survey results from 1500 students across the EMEA region
- Customer-driven product roadmap of Turnitin
Digital assessment in an in-person environment – how Kings College London (KCL) have used Gradescope when returning to the exam hall
Since the pandemic, Kings College London (KCL) has experienced strong demand from STEM-based subjects to return to face-to-face invigilated exams, prompted by collusion concerns. In response to this, KCL’s Teaching Enhanced Learning (TEL) team devised a plan; students would write their answers on paper, which would be scanned and uploaded to Gradescope, ready for academics to mark. Pilots were delivered in 2021, with a wider rollout in summer 2022 (where 16 modules and 2,000 scripts were scanned into Gradescope).
A summary of the challenges and benefits of delivering face-to-face invigilated assessments via Gradescope are below:
Challenges:
- Took a lot of planning; key stakeholders needed to be involved (teaching teams, Exams teams, Printing office). KCL ran pilots to test the end-to-end process.
- Finding appropriate venue
- Equipment that can handle large volumes of scanning
- Knowledge of marking models
- Essential to have a back-up plan (i.e., marking on paper)
- Gradescope limitations; the platform is not ideal for second marking yet (i.e., lack of flagging where there are mark discrepancies)
- Scalability considerations: KCL are currently exploring option of having dedicated scanning rooms and are exploring iPad use for students but at a very early stage.
Benefits:
- Marking time halved
- Consistency in marking increased
- Feedback from markers was overwhelmingly positive – preferred this method of marking vs. paper marking.
Panel Discussion: Enhancing the Student Experience – an academic and a student view
Dr Mehmet Orkun Canbay – Qatar University
Sandra F. Gomes – PhD Candidate, Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto (FMUP)
Academic view
Dr Mehmet addressed that the challenge that students often face is with the transition from general to academic writing process and need support from educators. He has experienced some difficulty with the mental attitude that the students have before they start academic writing. Students who have negative attitude towards academic writing need more attention from academics to change and develop students’ attitude into a positive one. Academic writing requires various skills such as critical thinking, being creative and higher order. Dr Mehmet has perceived that students require guidelines and feedback from academics to see if they have made any progress which in turn will have a constructive impact on the individual’s confidence.
Student view
Sandra raised a commonly overlooked challenge that students experience – seeing that students have grown up in a technology advanced world, does not mean that they have “mastered technology”. The assumption that students have passively acquired digital skills is often inaccurate. Sandra has experienced many masters and PhD students who need help with ‘simple’ processes of submitting work, referencing correctly and other areas of academic writing. She emphasized that institutions need to play a more active role in providing training, clear instructions, and guidance to prepare students better with their assessment, emphasizing need for guidance in advance.
Survey Results
The Turnitin tool is implemented at 16k institutions with 40 million students and 220 million annual submissions. Aaron Yaveski (Vice President) shared the survey results gathered from 1,500 students regarding their attitudes towards contract cheating, essay mills and academic integrity. The main findings are conveyed below:
62%Felt non-original was a problem in their country |
43%Have submitted non-original work, or know someone who has |
69%Want their institutions to do more to encourage original work |
Essay mills?
Essay mills is an illegal online platform that facilitates contract cheating where students purchase written work that they can pass off as their own.
43%of students have heard of essay mills |
44%of students have seen adverts of them |
Where have they heard about essay mills?
50%Social media |
21%Word of mouth |
16%Messaging apps |
Why might students submit non-original work?
| Reason | Response |
| Feeling overwhelmed | 23.0% |
| Workload | 21.0% |
| Parental pressure to succeed | 19.9% |
| Economic pressure (e.g. work commitments) | 15.7% |
| External factors (e.g. Covid lockdowns etc) | 10.6% |
| Peer pressure | 7.9% |
Five recommendations for how we can all work together:
- Embed academic integrity and broader academic skills earlier in education
- Clear, concise, inclusive, accessible academic integrity policies
- Aim to make misconduct cases ‘teachable moments’
- Build a coalition of institutions, students, parents, and other stakeholders to uphold academic integrity
- Adopt appropriate technology
For more information, please refer to this white paper: here
Customer-Driven Product Roadmap
Annie Chechitelli (Chief Product Officer) unveiled the latest customer research and provided a walkthrough of the product roadmap in response to the insights. There are some new and upcoming features that Turnitin are working on that will be released in 2023.
Gradescope mobile app
The Gradescope mobile app has been launched because it is a better way for students to upload their work and review their scores. The new mobile app also reduces the challenges associated with finding a scanner or third-party apps to upload physical paper exams. From the uploaded assignment the Gradescope AI will group similar answers together for instructors to efficiently grade them in less time.
New similarity report
Based on the feedback from users Turnitin are working on improving the similarity report to make it easier to interpret and this will increase the report’s usefulness as a teaching tool for academics. The new report will enable instructors to compare students work with the matching material. Also, ensuring the report is accessible like grading and feedback flows.
Integrated assessment workflows from Feedback Studio
The team are actively working on a future project based on integrating the different Turnitin assessment types into the Feedback Studio workflow so that academics have access to some of the key areas that exist in Gradescope without having to go to a separate product.
Improved grading and feedback in Turnitin Feedback Studio (TFS)
From customer research Turnitin intend to address the following problems:
- Improving student engagement with instructor feedback
- Better supporting accessibility standards to create great user experience
- Prioritized feedback to help focus students on the most important feedback to action
- More engaging and interactive feedback with embedded media
- Grouped QuickMark comments to decrease cognitive load
- Improved mobile support to more easily review feedback
- Track student engagement with feedback and offer insights
AI paraphrase detection/writing
Turnitin are exploring AI paraphrase detection and are in the prototype testing phase. The Turnitin team will be working with users when developing the AI writing tool to ensure they meet the requirements.