Message to NU community

Nazarbayev University would like to inform the community that we recently discovered a loophole in the way we operated the Turnitin platform and that we have taken swift steps to plug this hole so it cannot be abused in the future. 

It appears that a student may have anonymously uploaded a paper, using an expired course code, to try to understand how Turnitin worked. The paper became part of the internal Turnitin reference database, resulting in a text-matching report.

Our Information Services team immediately began a forensic investigation into the cause of this unique problem.

 Within three days, the forensic team uncovered the problem, reported it to Turnitin and ensured the matching paper was removed from the NU database.

 Fortunately, in this case, although the paper was uploaded, no student submitted an assessment based on it. Our Information Services department has already taken steps to ensure this will not happen again.

This notice is posted as a reminder to all our community to be extremely careful about all aspects of academic integrity.

If you have any academic integrity questions, please check with any of the following: your professor, Writing Centre Instructors, the Information Services team, professional Library staff, or any members of the Office of the Provost.

 Working together, we will continue to ensure that all our students succeed on their own merits.