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.)
• Navigating the Turnitin results (Links to an external site.)
• Turnitin's AI writing detection capabilities FAQs (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
• Turnitin's AI Writing Detection feature should not be used as objective evidence of AI use. AI detection is prone to both false-negative and false-positive results. If you choose to make use of the AI Writing Detection indicator, please be aware of its limitations and treat it only as an indicator that further review may be warranted.