At CalPac, your teachers require that you submit major writing assignments to a website called Turnitin.com.
At Turnitin, a few things happen:
Essays are screened for originality.
Students can see where they have plagiarized, whether accidentally or intentionally.
Students can view or even listen to specific feedback and comments on their work from their instructors.
Above is an example of one student's submission as screened through Turnitin. See all that red highlighted material and the big "26%" in the top right-hand corner? Those things are not good. Here are the issues with this submission:
The student has copied and pasted, verbatim, chunks of material from Internet sources.
The student has not provided quotation marks for what she has stolen from this source, and even if she had, this is WAY too much material to quote. Remember, an essay should largely be your own ideas and writing, the "cake" in a cupcake; quoted material in an essay is like the sprinkles on top (used sparingly).
The student has not provided citations or given credit in any way to the source used to write this essay.
You're in luck! If you have used Turnitin to submit an essay and you see an originality report like the one above, it helps you to see the mistakes you have made! The good news is, once you see it, you can fix it! If this happens to you, contact your teacher and let him or her know that you now realize you have plagiarism problems in your essay and that you would like to resubmit the essay after fixing these problems.
Your teachers have that information. Just ask!
Once you have the Enrollment information you need to sign up for your courses over at Turnitin, you'll have everything you need to get set up.
This Turnitin Guide contains links for all things related to setting up an account or submitting as assignment to Turnitin.