In an effort to ensure high academic standards, the University of West Alabama (UWA) subscribes to Turnitin.com. Turnitin.com is an electronic tool that can be used to educate students and faculty about plagiarism. Furthermore, the use of Turnitin.com can help prevent and detect plagiarism.

The decision to use Turnitin.com is left up to individual faculty members. Faculty members who choose to use Turnitin.com must notify students in their courses at the beginning of a term in which it is to be used. Additionally, the following statement must be placed in the course syllabus:

The University of West Alabama reserves the right to use electronic means to detect and help prevent plagiarism. Students agree that by taking this course all course documents are subject to submission to Turnitin.com. All materials submitted to Turnitin.com will become source documents in Turnitin.com's restricted access database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism in such documents. Students may be required by the instructor to individually submit course documents electronically to Turnitin.com.

Turnitin.com is also an educational tool available for student use. Students may choose to submit documents to Turnitin.com to aid in identifying non-original text that they may have failed to cite.

Faculty members who submit student documents to Turnitin.com should not provide any information that identifies students’ personal information; therefore, aliases or codes should be used when making a submission. Once an assignment is submitted to Turnitin.com, an originality report is generated and available on the Turnitin.com web site for use by the instructor. It is the instructor’s responsibility to assess whether document segments identified by Turnitin.com as non-original text indicate plagiarism. It is important for the instructor to consider a student’s use of citations and references related to these segments. If an instructor determines that a submission is improperly documented, the course of action to be taken is at the discretion of the instructor. Instructors should refer to the steps outlined in UWA's Academic Dishonesty Policy for guidance.

Turnitin.com submissions become part of the Turnitin.com restricted access database. As a result, there is the possibility that faculty members may be contacted by persons external to the University concerning papers originating at UWA. Under no circumstances should faculty disclose information pertaining to student papers to other persons. All inquires related to Turnitin.com documents originating at UWA should be directed to the Provost.