An evaluation of the use of Turnitin as a tool for electronic submission, marking, and feedback in higher education in South Africa: Students’ perspective

Turnitin has been operating for over 20 years checking plagiarism in student assessments and giving feedback to improve student writing skills and encourage originality, and over the years the use of Turnitin has been published mainly by lecturers and teachers. Thus, the main objective was to understand and determine the underlining viewpoint of students towards Turnitin as a submission, marking, and feedback tool in higher education. The research involved identifying the benefits and drawbacks of Turnitin as an electronic submission, marking, and feedback tool for students, determining the effectiveness of Turnitin tools for lecturer feedback and identifying the possible implications of Examsoft and Gradescope as marking and feedback tools. Due to the nature of this study, a quantitative approach was adopted with the use of a questionnaire. Data were collected from 51 students at Eduvos from different academic levels and analysed through descriptive statistics using graphs. The results showed that students in South Africa experience benefits of Turnitin such as accessibility and convenience as electronic tools, convenience view for grades, and clear originality reports. The drawbacks were: loss of work after submission, issues with file upload size, negative marking due to no feedback, restricted file types for submission, identification of false positives, and no section for late submissions. It was also evident that the effectiveness of lecturer feedback tools differs per academic level. These findings can be used to enhance students’ academic experience as there were more drawbacks than benefits identified in the study.