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Getting Started with Authorship for Investigators

This guide will cover the key information that you need to know about Authorship for Investigators and help you get started using it at your institution. Each chapter has the relevant roles next to it to help you navigate to the sections most relevant to you.

Group exercises

Throughout this guide there are group exercises that we recommend you and your colleagues attempt. We believe these exercises will help you better understand how to use Authorship in your institution and help you combat contract cheating and other forms of academic misconduct.

What is contract cheating? 

Contract cheating is the practice of individuals procuring third-parties to produce their academic work and then submitting that work as their own, original creation. This ranges from buying a pre-written answer to an essay topic to personalized essays written on demand.

Where Authorship for Investigators fits in

Authorship for Investigators offers the tools to combat the rise in contract cheating by providing academic integrity officers, student conduct officers, or whoever conducts additional investigations into severe cases of academic misconduct with an institution-wide dashboard and evidence-gathering report.

It is important to note that Authorship for Investigators does not identify contract cheating. It takes human judgment to determine whether contract cheating has occurred based on the balance of probabilities.

Authorship for Investigators automates many of the manual workflows that investigators of serious academic misconduct spend hours performing. Tedious tasks like collecting document sets for the investigation, trawling document metadata, and creating the misconduct investigation report are now streamlined.

Authorship for Investigators also provides new evidence about a student’s writing over time that can be used to confirm suspicions of a possible misconduct violation. This evidence is provided in an Authorship Report that is generated by either manually uploading files to compare against each other, or by entering a Turnitin paper ID and selecting from a list of the students’ past work which files you would like to compare against.

Getting your institution set up as an administrator

Once your account has been provisioned by us, the email address that you designated as your account administrator will receive an activation email. This email will prompt you to create a username and password. You can use these credentials to log in to your Turnitin account at the URL provided to you. This URL is where you will access the Authorship for Investigators features of your Turnitin account from now on and it is unique to your institution.

Bookmark your institution’s URL so you can access it easily.

If you use a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle or Microsoft Teams, you will still access your Authorship for Investigators from this Turnitin URL. You cannot access Authorship for Investigator features from an LMS.

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