Turnitin (Canvas Instructors) - Using the Assignment Similarity Checker

Turnitin is a "similarity" checker that can be enabled for Canvas assignments. By enabling Turnitin for an assignment, you can see how much original text Turnitin believes a student's submission contains. Please note that Turnitin is often referred to as a plagiarism checker. This is not 100% accurate, hence their marketing around "similarity." We recommend you actively check any student submissions that you're concerned about.

How-To Resources for Using Turnitin in Canvas

• Enabling Turnitin for an assignment (Links to an external site.)
• Accessing Turnitin results (Links to an external site.)
• Interpreting the Turnitin results (Links to an external site.)
• More Turnitin help resources (Links to an external site.)
• UWGB Writing Center Plagiarism Handout (Links to an external site.)
   (Links to an external site.)
• UWGB Cofrin Library Plagiarism Libguide (Links to an external site.)
• UWGB Cofrin Library Citation Libguide (Links to an external site.)

Things to Keep in Mind

• When Turnitin checks student work, it stores that work in its database indefinitely to check other student submissions against. There are two points of interest this creates.
  • If a student submits a rough draft and its stored in the Turnitin database, future versions will have a high similarity score because they're being compared to the original submission.
  • This leads to an ethical conundrum for some, since student work is being turned over to a company that in turn profits from it through having a more robust database to check submissions against.
  • If you would like to NOT have student work stored in the Turnitin database, set the Store submissions in: option to "Do not store the submitted papers" when you create your Turnitin-enabled assignment.
• Students are savvy to Turnitin and may try to work around its features. The most common attempt to do this is to enclose the entire paper in very small, white-colored quotation marks. If an instructor sets Turnitin to Exclude quoted materials, the entire paper will come back as 100% original. To avoid this, either do not elect to exclude quoted text, or pay attention to 100% original submissions.
• Make it a teaching opportunity.
  • Allow students to see their Turnitin scores
  • Provide students the opportunity to re-submit their Assignment as many times as needed before the deadline (so long as you also "Do not store the submitted papers" in Turnitin's repository)
  • Go over interpreting Turnitin with students, or provide them resources for doing so