Turnitin Releases Website Grading Rubric as Free Educational Resource

Open access to interactive rubric helps educators teach students proper research and source evaluation skills

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Feb 14, 2013, 11:45 ET

OAKLAND, Calif., Feb. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Turnitin, the leader in originality checking and online grading, has made the interactive rubric designed to analyze and grade the academic quality of Internet sources used by students available free to educators through an open access license with Creative Commons. The license allows the standalone SEER (Source Educational Evaluation Rubric) to be shared and edited for non-commercial purposes.

Instructors can register for the interactive SEER at: http://pages.turnitin.com/seer_rubric.html

"Recent research shows that students rely heavily on websites of questionable academic value," said Jason Chu, senior education manager for Turnitin. "We believe that widespread usage of SEER will help educators teach students the importance of using quality resources in their research."

Over 2500 educators recently downloaded a white paper that explains the concepts behind SEER and discusses best practices for its use. The paper, "What's Wrong with Wikipedia? Evaluating the Sources Used by Students," is available at: http://pages.turnitin.com/evaluating_sources.html

Turnitin developed the rubric in conjunction with secondary and higher education instructors who field-tested it on over 300 websites that are commonly used by students as sources in their writing. SEER is built on five criteria: Authority, Educational Value, Intent, Originality, and Quality.

About Turnitin
Turnitin is the global leader in evaluating and improving student writing. The company's cloud-based service for originality checking, online grading and peer review saves instructors time and provides rich feedback to students. One of the most widely distributed educational applications in the world, Turnitin is used by more than 10,000 institutions in 126 countries to manage the submission, tracking and evaluation of student papers online. Turnitin also offers iThenticate, a plagiarism detection service for commercial markets, and WriteCheck, a suite of formative tools for writers. Turnitin is backed by Warburg Pincus and is headquartered in Oakland, Calif., with an international office in Newcastle, U.K. For more information, please visit www.turnitin.com.

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SOURCE Turnitin