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How to Use Turnitin

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a program that offers two valuable assessment features:

  1. An online, integrated grading system (Feedback Studio) that enables the use of Quick Marks, Rubrics, and other features to grade fairly and efficiently
  2. A built-in textual similarity function that compares a student's assignment to every document in its database, including all previously submitted papers, and on the Internet. If textual similarities are found, they are highlighted for Instructors and their grading team to examine and determine if the submitted work was the student's own work and/or properly attributed.

Turnitin can be used to grade and check lab reports, essays, research papers, or any other written assignment. 

When you use the entire Feedback Studio, Turnitin ensures fairness and equity because every paper is checked for integrity before grading begins. 

Create Turnitin Assignments

For instructions regarding creating an assignment using Turnitin on Canvas, please refer to Turnitin's Guides.

We recommend making these choices when setting up a Turnitin assignment:

  1. restricting file uploads to doc or docx files (rather than allowing PDFs). Those files allow us to see properties, which can be key in some cases;
  2. store submissions in the Standard Paper Repository
  3. compare submissions against all options
  4. do not exclude bibliographic materials, quoted materials or small matches (you can always discount them later when analyzing the report)
  5. do NOT show the originality report to the students (see below)

After you've done this for one assignment in the course, you can choose to save the settings as default so you don't have to make these choices for future assignments.

Let students know you're using Turnitin.

Include the following statement in your syllabus:

"Students agree that by taking this course all required papers will be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. Use of the Turnitin.com service is subject to the terms of use agreement posted on the Turnitin.com site."

Use Turnitin Appropriately

Don't limit your use of Turnitin as a way to detect plagiarism or other integrity problems in an assignment. Use it to potentially prevent plagiarism from occuring by:

  • show students a sample Turnitin Similarity report to educate them on citation and attribution.
  • tell students about Turnitin and refer them to the Library's guide to avoid plagiarism or the Writing Hub if they are unsure/tentative about their writing skills 

We do not recommend allowing students to see their own Turnitin Similarity Reports without coaching or mentoring, at least for novice writers. Two reasons: 1) novice writers don’t know how to interpret the reports so seeing them can cause unnecessary panic; and 2) novice writers don’t necessarily know how to fix the issues (or they’ll misdiagnose the issues) and will likely therefore just make changes to avoid text matching. But, if instructors (or learning/writing experts) use similarity reports as a diagnostic tool, they can use that as the starting point for a conversation with the student to explain what is wrong, why it’s wrong, and to diagnose and treat the underlying issue (e.g., lack knowledge of citation, didn’t critically read the source, language skills). Think of similarity reports as a test result from your doctor; there’s a reason they don’t just pass “bad news” test results on to you without explaining the results or discussing treatment/remedy plans.

Understand the Similarity Reports

A Turnitin Similarity Report is just a tool that detects text matches. The reports do not detect plagiarism, nor accuse a student of plagiarism. The Reports are also fallible in that they do not guarantee integrity.

For example, we've seen student papers with a 0% match in a Similarity Report but found that the paper was completely plagiarized from the web. How did that happen? The student used a "spin bot" to rewrite the plagiarized material so it no longer was a text match.

We've also seen Similarity Reports that indicate as much as 45% text matching, but it actually wasn't plagiarism. How did that happen? The Instructor didn't tell it to ignore quoted text (which is good, and what we recommend) and the student copied the questions/prompts they were answering.

All student assignments should be read for integrity before they are graded. Before reading/grading the paper, look at the Turnitin Report and examine any flags or similarities it detects to see if they indicate an integrity problem to you. Then, if the Turnitin Report is fine, still keep integrity in mind as you read/grade the paper. If the paper doesn't sound "right", it could be an indication of Contract Cheating (the student submitted a paper written by someone else) or unethical GenAI use. Contact aio@ucsd.edu if you find yourself in this position and need some assistance deciphering what you are seeing.