English-language Student Papers Will Be Checked for Plagiarism
Starting this year, English language papers by Russian and international students at HSE will be tested for plagiarism using the Turnitin service. HSE is one of the first Russian universities to join this anti-plagiarism system.
As HSE Vice-Rector Sergey Roshchin explains, ‘HSE adheres to the principles of fair play in academic work and has had a system in place for many years which allows us to detect plagiarism in students’ work. But the system can only be used for Russian language texts. Our university is becoming more and more popular on the international education market and we have an increasing number of courses in English. In 2015 we will have 17 English taught Master’s programmes. The number of subjects taught in English on Russian programmes is growing - they make up more than 10% of the university’s courses. In this situation, the amount of work students produce in English is growing too. The internationalisation of teaching in the university, the increasing number of parts of the teaching process happening in English, the appearance of foreign students, some of whom don’t know any Russian at all, all these things compel us to expand our methods of protection against plagiarism.’
Turnitin is more than ten years old. Thousands of universities in 140 countries use it, including most of the world’s top universities on the Times Higher Education rankings. Turnitin checks papers against texts from three databases including more than 300 million student papers, more than 130 million articles and books and more than 45 million web pages. The databases are constantly updated and added to. Turnitin allows us to identify the percentage of borrowing in a text and to determine the source of that borrowing.
To check dissertations or course work using Turnitin, students will have to upload their papers in LMS through their user profile. The education programme managers will be responsible for sending works to be checked. Once the work has been uploaded and checked, students will be able to download a QR code as a pdf that must be printed and attached to the paper in question.