What is Turnitin?
What is it?
Turnitin is a software programme that helps you to understand how to cite sources appropriately and thus to avoid plagiarism. This helps you to develop good academic practice.
Why are we using it ?
We use Turnitin on almost all courses. Writing referenced assignments (i.e., supporting ideas with reference to relevant literature) is a key part of the assessment. This obviously involves using sources appropriately (and so avoiding plagiarism). Using Turnitin is one way to increase your understanding of how to use sources and what plagiarism is.
When can I use it?
You can check your use of sources by submitting drafts to Turnitin (up to 24 hours) before the deadline. This will also give you time to revise your work and resubmit it to Turnitin if necessary. On your Moodle courses with Turnitin enabled, there will be a draft submission area. This is where you can upload a draft of your work to check your similarity score.
How does it work?
Assignments, including drafts, are uploaded to Turnitin via the moodle link. It will then generate a similarity report which you can then check. Turnitin compares your submission against its database and produces this report which will show you how similar your work is to its database.
It is essential that you realise that there is no best number for the similarity score. An essay with a low similarity score might still be judged as plagiarised if all of the similar material is in one block, plagiarised from an unreferenced (or incorrectly referenced) source. On a similar note, your sources might show up even if they have been correctly referenced. It's very important that you take the time to go through your work and check the similarity report.
Don't panic if you see things highlighted as matching - this may be things as simple as your reference list/bibliography correctly matching against the database.
It’s important to remember that Turnitin is only a basic tool for assessing the similarity of your work to other people’s. Following submission your lecturer will review your coursework, the Turnitin Originality Report and use their experience and judgement to review your coursework content and your academic practice.