MiraCosta faculty using Turnitin for plagiarism prevention should be aware of these key points from MiraCosta’s administrative procedure on intellectual property:

When an instructor makes use of software that incorporates student works into its database, as is common with plagiarism-prevention software, the use should be governed by the following guidelines:

Student work may not be submitted to plagiarism-prevention software or other software that incorporates a student’s work into its database without the student’s knowledge.
Students should be informed in the syllabus that such software is used in the course and that the software incorporates any student work submitted into its database.
Students should be given alternatives, such as requiring students who do not submit their work to plagiarism-prevention software, to document their references using an annotated bibliography and/or photocopies of the first page of all sources used and/or to write a brief paper describing their research methodologies.