A study on the significance of Turnitin towards plagiarism among students in UiTM Kota Kinabalu, Sabah / Nur Amira Ramli and Nurul Hidayah Zam Raini

The issues of plagiarism is common among students. They tend to take a short cuts or alternatives in completing their assignments and in producing a good writing by plagiarize. There are various factors that can contribute to this behavior i.e. demographic, social and technological factors. According to Cromwell, 2006; McMurty, 2001, since the inception of the World Wide Web, plagiarism is a problem that has hit the education world even harder. It has become easier for students to copy and paste material into their assignments or reports and submit it for grading as their original work because there is so much information readily available in electronic form from the internet. In the past, for students to plagiarize, they had to take time to write down material from books, but with the Internet, they just cut and paste into their work within a short of period of time Area of plagiarism in this study is college plagiarism which is essentially different from general definition of plagiarism that involved a plagiarism in workplace, artistic, musical and mechanical. College plagiarism is more like stealing the words without appropriate citation. College plagiarism is does not involved financial losses thus it is called as an in-house college situation (Harris, W., 2007). One of the alternative in reducing plagiarism issue is by the introduction of Turnitin website. Turnitin is the leading originality checking and plagiarism prevention service used by millions of students and faculty, and thousands of institutions worldwide. Turnitin encourages best practices for using and citing other people's written material.