Attachment 01 - USAF Academy Sole Source TFS.pdf

December 1, 2023

United States Air Force Academy

Turnitin® Feedback Studio (“Turnitin”), including its associated components, is a single-source product developed and sold by Turnitin, LLC, based in Oakland, CA. Our product is a unique service that is not offered by any other vendor or reseller in a similar format. The product may be procured only from Turnitin, LLC, at the address listed below. Turnitin is an item for which competition is precluded due to patent (SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR FACILITATING

ORIGINALITY ANALYSIS - USPTO 8,296,661).

The Turnitin service provides an academic integrity tool that allows institutions to easily determine if students are writing and submitting original work. Utilizing our unique technology, Turnitin searches the Internet, as well as our proprietary databases of student papers and digital texts for sources of potential plagiarism. The service then generates a custom Similarity Report that identifies unoriginal or improperly cited student writing by highlighting matches to sources found on the Internet, in our database of previously submitted papers, and/or in the proprietary databases of subscription-based publication material from content aggregators with whom we have partnered.

To find potential plagiarism, Turnitin has developed its own search technology (in use for over 15 years). Turnitin’s proprietary crawler is different from many other solutions that rely on search engines such as Yahoo or Bing's Search API but cannot scale because of cost or request limitations. Our crawler has been built from the start to be horizontally scalable, smart about recrawling, lean on storage, and flexible about what can be done with data. Some of the key features you can expect from our crawler:

● Broad, scalable, focused crawl of the web.

● Prioritized (re)crawl, and how often.

● Persistent, query-friendly store of the crawl frontier allowing for useful, rapid reporting.

● Smart crawling that will avoid junk (ex. crawler traps).

● Crawling non-HTML file types.

● Support for selectively crawling JavaScript-based sites.

Turnitin’s patented and proprietary technology compares submitted papers to:

● A database of previously submitted student papers—more than 1.8 billion submissions (as of January 2023)

● A database of subscription-based electronically published content that covers over 170 million articles from mainstream to specialized sources on virtually every popular, business and professional topic, including:

● CrossRef, which includes more than 56,000 journals and over 89 million articles and documents from publishers including: Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier, American Institute of Physics, IEEE, Cambridge University Press, Taylor and Francis, Springer Nature, Emerald, British Medical Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine.

● 200,000 law reviews from U.S. law schools

● Over 97% of the top 10,000 cited journals in the world (according to SCOPUS data)

● A database of 99 billion+ pages of continuously-updated content from the publicly accessible Internet

● Ever growing collection of ProQuest Dissertations and Theses

● An archived copy of past web pages no longer available on the Internet.

● Partnership with CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access papers, giving us access to 135 million records from 9,777 repositories worldwide which, where accessible, are added to our internet database

● Over 85 million links from more than 4,500 open access repositories

● More than 41 million Wikipedia articles provided through directly ingesting content

Turnitin is a service of Turnitin, LLC

2101 Webster Street, Suite 1800 • Oakland, CA 94612 www.turnitin.com • sales@turnitin.com • +1 510-764-7600 http://www.turnitin.com mailto:sales@turnitin.com

Turnitin generates a Similarity Report that includes multiple views and features:

● Reports are available within minutes after submission (usually far less than two minutes).

● Direct-source comparisons of matched words to matched documents (highlighted with or without color coding) numbered and aligned side-by-side.

● Pattern-recognition matching of both word-for-word and paraphrased text.

● Ability to exclude matching material within quotes, within the bibliography, or any individual source.

● Option to exclude a template from the Similarity Report.

● Ability to view all underlying matched words that have been obscured by overlapping matches

● Accepted submission formats that generate a Similarity Report include: Microsoft Word®, Microsoft

PowerPoint®, WordPerfect®, OpenOffice, Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, Text, Postscript, PDF, Hangul, Excel, and Google Docs. Turnitin Feedback Studio can accept any file type as an assignment submission.

● Option to refresh a Similarity Report to include matches to any updated content in the database.

● Automatic exclusion of submissions by the same author to the same assignment.

● Ability to translate content from non-English languages into English in order to compare to our English language database. Languages include Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian Bokmal, Norwegian Nyorsk, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Turkish, , Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu.

Turnitin algorithms can determine when students have deliberately manipulated text in order to bypass integrity checks.

If we notice something strange, we flag it for review in the Flags insight panel. Integrity insights in the Flags panel include:

● Replaced Characters identify when a letter is replaced with a symbol or letter from another alphabet that looks like the letter it is replacing.

● Hidden Characters identify characters that are in the same color as the background (e.g., white font on a white background) or characters in very small font sizes that can’t be seen with the naked eye.

The complete Turnitin solution also includes paperless online grading tools and PeerMark® online peer reviewing tools:

● Turnitin’s online grading is a time-saving, paperless alternative to traditional pen and paper grading, making it easy for instructors to give students the valuable, time-sensitive feedback that is so essential for building quality writing skills. Key components include: pre-loaded and customizable marks and comments; voice comments;

customizable and shareable rubrics; the ability to associate on-paper comments with rubric criterion, automatic checking of grammar, spelling, mechanics, usage and style using ETS® e-rater® technology.

● PeerMark online peer reviewing gives instructors the ability to create peer review assignments that students use to evaluate and learn from one another's work. Key components include: automatic paper distribution and the option to allow for anonymous reviews.

Turnitin is accessible via a web-based interface and is hosted in Turnitin’s secure data centers.

Turnitin builds in-house integrations using LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) in order to integrate into most standard course management or learning management systems (LMS) for an optimized experience using Turnitin solutions and an LMS. LMSs we integrate with include Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, Brightspace (formerly “Desire2Learn”), Sakai, and more. These integrations make Turnitin seem like a natural extension of the web application an institution already has in place.

Annual subscription fees include unlimited access to free videos and documentation for educators and students to learn how to use Turnitin. If you need additional information about our services, please contact us at 510-764-7600 or visit our website at http://www.turnitin.com. Thank you for your interest in Turnitin.

Sincerely, Turnitin is a service of Turnitin, LLC

2101 Webster Street, Suite 1800 • Oakland, CA 94612 www.turnitin.com • sales@turnitin.com • +1 510-764-7600 http://www.turnitin.com

Angela Rhee for Chris Caren Chief Executive Officer Turnitin, LLC, developers of Turnitin® Phone: +1-510-764-7600

Turnitin is a service of Turnitin, LLC

2101 Webster Street, Suite 1800 • Oakland, CA 94612 www.turnitin.com • sales@turnitin.com • +1 510-764-7600