Global Study Shows 44 Percent Drop in Unoriginal Writing Across South African Higher Education; Digital Feedback Tools See Massive Growth

NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, United Kingdom, Nov. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Turnitin, the leader in improving how students write and learn, today released an interactive infographic reporting results of a global study on unoriginal content and the importance of feedback in the writing process.

The study examined more than 14 million submissions across 15 countries to see how institutions use the software to reduce unoriginal writing and engage students in the writing process through the use of online feedback and grading tools. Click to tweet.

While there have been numerous studies of Turnitin's efficacy in larger English-speaking markets, this study demonstrates that the adoption of Turnitin as a digital feedback tool is occurring globally.

View the interactive chart to see the results and download each country's full report.

Specifically, South African higher education institutions enjoyed a 44 percent decline in unoriginal writing and saw a 3012 percent increase in the number of papers graded online between 2010 and 2014.

Jessica Kell, academic development coordinator of IIE Varsity College, said of Turnitin: "Our biggest focus is on remediation, using the technology as an approach to improving the students' academic writing.

"It's invaluable in educating the students just how important original work is and assisting us to teach the students paraphrasing skills, as we are able to point out specific areas of their writing that they need work on in order to improve."

Some general findings from the study:

• Higher education institutions in 12 of the 15 countries reduced unoriginal content by more than 30 percent.
• Majority of content matches from highly unoriginal submissions (greater than 50 percent unoriginal content) came from matches to other student papers rather than from websites, academic textbooks or journals.
• Use of Turnitin as a digital feedback tool showed growth in all 15 countries. The number of papers graded online in secondary and higher education institutions increased by 1800 percent between 2005 and 2014.

"As education moves to greater use of technology, Turnitin is becoming a core component of the writing instruction process around the world," said Jason Chu, education director at Turnitin.

"The study demonstrates that Turnitin is not only used as a tool to promote original writing, but also as an instructional tool to provide feedback to students and engage them in the writing process."

Reports available for: Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand.

About Turnitin

Turnitin is revolutionizing the experience of writing to learn. The Company's cloud-based service for originality checking, online grading and peer reviewing saves instructors time and provides valuable feedback to students. Turnitin is one of the most widely distributed educational applications in the world and used by more than 15,000 institutions in 140 countries to manage the submission, tracking and evaluation of student papers online. Turnitin is backed by Insight Venture Partners, GIC, Norwest Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital and Georgian Partners, and is headquartered in Oakland, California, with offices in U.K., Netherlands and Australia.