Allowing students to submit each draft multiple times before the due date helps them foster the development of their own writing.

Create an incentive to start and submit work early. Students who turn in their work early will have a chance to look at their OriginalityCheck feedback to see if they've adequately integrated their sources and then make changes as appropriate before resubmitting by the due date. There is a 24-hour waiting period before the next report will be processed to prevent devious students from resubmitting their assignments too often to prevent them from trying to iteratively bring down their similarity score.

What do students’ sources suggest about their approach to online research?

Turnitin's annual study examines the sources students use in their written work and the implications of their choices. This study was conducted for both Higher Ed and Secondary Education.

The higher ed study and infographic is based on an analysis of over 112 million content matches from more than 28 million student papers submitted to Turnitin between July 2011 and June 2012. Included are recommendations for educators on how to improve student research and citation skills.		The secondary education study and infographic is based on an analysis of over 44 million content matches from more than 9 million student papers submitted to Turnitin between July 2011 and June 2012. Included are recommendations for educators on how to improve student research and citation skills.

Over 80 million student papers were submitted to Turnitin worldwide in 2012. But how much is 80 million papers anyway? The average length of each paper submission is three pages, which is 240 million sheets of paper. So to help put things in perspective, here's how things stack up:

Over 80 million student papers were submitted to Turnitin in 2012... Enough to save 3,000 trees if we went paperless.

Every December, millions of children around the world write letters to Santa, explaining how they've been good boys and girls and letting him know what they want to see under their trees come December 25th.

Over the years, the number of kids sending him letters skyrocket. His mailbox was flooded and he found himself buried in letters, unable to respond to all of them.

One day, a little elf told Santa about Turnitin—how he could use it to accept submissions from the children, check the letters for originality, give immediate feedback, and even use rubrics to help determine if they've been naughty or nice. So he gave it a shot.

Watch How Santa Grades Millions of Letters with Turnitin on Vimeo or on YouTube

Share this video with your colleagues, especially the ones that look like they've been in an avalanche of essays.

Happy Holidays from Turnitin.

Our team has recently re-launched Plagiarism.org, an educational and informative resource on plagiarism and best practices for ensuring originality in written work.

This site, geared toward students and writers in general, offers a wealth of information specifically about plagiarism, as well as information on how to properly attribute and cite sources. On Plagiarism.org, you'll also find an "Ask the Experts" feature, FAQs, and a resource section with downloadable handouts for students.

Visit Plagiarism.org and share this resource with your students.

Keeping students honest in and outside of class time is a challenge for most educators. Add in the movement toward online classes, and the challenge is only compounded. A recent story in U.S. News and World Report discusses the variety of ways that educators are dealing with academic dishonesty and plagiarism.

"In every single class, we have information on what plagiarism is, and a major piece is that we hold our students accountable if they're caught," says Diane Johnson, assistant director of faculty services at St. Leo University in Florida. She goes on to say that students have been disciplined in the past for copying others' work. "If you hear that one of your classmates has been reported for plagiarism, it gives you an impetus to not do it too."

Essays from essay writing services often contain extensive material cribbed from online sources as well as material from banks of standard essays that have been recycled many times over. Students who purchase so-called custom-written essays may not be getting as original work as they think. Because of the size and reach of Turnitin's databases, Turnitin is likely to flag content in so-called custom essays as unoriginal.

In a blog posting by Dan Ariely (professor at Duke University and the author of "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty" and "Predictably Irrational") entitled "Plagiarism and essay mills," he explains the results of an experiment in which he purchased custom essays to check out their quality. After receiving the absurdly poor quality essays produced by these services, he concludes, "...the day is not here where students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades for them. Moreover, we concluded that if students did try to buy a paper from an essay mill, just like us, they would feel that they have wasted their money and won’t try it again."

Instructors and students are most familiar with Turnitin as a plagiarism prevention tool. Many miss the opportunity to use Turnitin as a teaching tool to really engage students and provide them with meaningful feedback.

OriginalityCheck is an opportunity for instructors to connect with students to show them proper citation, to identify motivations for improper citation, and to address academic integrity. In other words, it gives instructors a teaching moment.