This means students can’t trick the system by changing words and resubmitting repeatedly. Once a student receives a report, he or she must wait 24 hours to get another report after resubmission (if this has been enabled by the instructor). One of the main benefits of Turnitin is that when students submit their draft assignments to Turnitin before a deadline, they can examine the report and make revisions before submitting their final version on the due date. If the default setting excludes quotes, references and small matches up to five words, this could give a more accurate overall percentage. However, matches in the originality report are influenced by various factors such as the assignment settings. However, if the matching 15% comes in one block of text, this could still indicate plagiarism.Ī high percentage of over 25% probably indicates plagiarized work. A percentage of below 15% probably indicates that plagiarism has not occurred. Most work will contain some words from other sources and this is nothing to worry about. The algorithm used is able to identify strings of words in a paper that are identical to those in the database. It generates a report that shows the degree of similarity between the work submitted and what is contained in the database. It can’t prove that a student has not plagiarized. Turnitin is not able to identify specific incidents of plagiarism. For instance, text shown in light green may be trivial or incidental.
Within the text of the Originality Report, matching text is also highlighted in color and is numbered. Students click on the colored square to view the report. If the square is red, it means that 75% to 100% of a paper matches. Five basic colors – blue, green, yellow, orange and red represent how much of a paper matches what’s in the database.įor example, a blue square means that less than 20 words in a paper is a match to what’s in the database. Next to the attached file, they see a percentage and a colored square. Students are able to access the report by going to their assignment. It may depend on the word count and how many documents are being submitted at the same time. When students submit papers, it doesn’t take long after submission for originality reports to be available. It will detect other students work if a student has copied from a previous paper submitted to the database. If a student uses library research databases to copy and paste text into a paper, Turnitin is most likely to identify this material as a match. If a student does a web search and copies and pastes information in an essay, chances are Turnitin will find the matching text and be able to identify where it came from. However, most of the sources that students typically use are included. There are sources that are not in the Turnitin database, especially if the material is only available in print. It also contains books, newspapers and academic journals as well as the student papers admitted to the system. Turnitin has a comparison database that contains publically available current and archived web content. This enhances the way in which students receive grades and feedback. Turnitin also offers tools for peer review and online assignment marking. It uses machine learning technology to analyze writing and give sentence-level feedback and other guidance to help students improve their work before turning it in. It helps to educate them about referencing techniques and appropriate citation.Ī Revision Assistant helps students throughout the writing process. One of the main advantages of using Turnitin is that students can identify potential instances of plagiarism in their assignments and fix these before final submission. An intuitive Similarity Report provides text matches and gives a similarity score. Turnitin supports academic work integrity by helping to check for plagiarism.