Driving legislative change during the most challenging year

Background

Best known in the UK for its similarity checking service, Turnitin is focused on both increasing awareness of their wider assessment solutions, and demonstrating their expertise and commitment to academic integrity.

With the coronavirus pandemic accelerating the shift to online learning, and with essay mills – commercial entities that write assignments for students to pass off as their own – increasingly targeting anxious students, our task was to demonstrate Turnitin’s expertise on the growing issue of academic integrity.

Our approach

We developed a steady stream of original thought leadership content that spoke directly to the issues universities faced throughout the pandemic, focusing on academic integrity and the challenges institutions were seeing around essay mill use. Our approach was to clearly showcase Turnitin’s experience and expertise in academic integrity, highlighting its product offering as a direct solution for educators in providing fair and accurate assessment. To help move away from misconceptions around Turnitin’s similarity checking service as a punitive measure, we focused on how the Turnitin suite of tools has been designed in collaboration with institutions to help develop students’ own writing skills and uphold original authorship.

With essay mills increasingly front of mind for the entire sector, we approached former universities minister Chris Skidmore MP with evidence from Turnitin on the risk these custom writing services pose in increasing the prevalence of contract cheating in higher education.

As a result, Turnitin was invited to a fact-finding meeting alongside other stakeholders with Chris Skidmore, and Turnitin was referenced in his speech in the House of Commons for the Essay Mills Prohibition Bill. With the bill attracting cross-party support, Turnitin’s work in upholding academic integrity is now front of mind for crucial policymakers.