Plagiarism

Turnitin

What is Turnitin?

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. 

How does it work? 

Assignments are uploaded to Turnitin via Moodle. When this happens, Turnitin checks your work against a large database of sources (textbooks, websites, other essays) to assess how similar your work is to information already written by others. From this information, Turnitin will produce what is known as a ‘similarity report’.

This report can be a helpful guide to you – it might highlight a quote you have used without referencing or a paragraph where you have borrowed heavily from a source without citing it appropriately.

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 Similarity Report and use their experience and judgement to review your coursework content and your academic practice.

When can you use Turnitin? 

You may be given the chance to submit your work in advance, review the outcome, and improve your referencing before submitting the final version. This usually happens in a draft submission area. Once your report is ready, you'll get an email notification. At busy times, this can take a while. Try to not upload a draft with very little time to spare; it's likely that lots of your classmates might have had the same idea and you could be waiting longer than anticipated for the system to process it. 

Note that your School may also ask you to submit an assignment to Turnitin after the submission deadline if there are concerns about possible plagiarism in the essay.

Turnitin and Online Exams

Turnitin may also be used for online exams. Your School(s) will let you know if they are using Turnitin and if you have any questions about this, you should contact your School directly to find out their local arrangements.

For exams:

• Turnitin will not allow for draft submissions
• Turnitin will not provide a similarity report
• You must follow the rules for submission
  • one single submission (using the correct file format as listed on the exam page)
  • typed (no drawings or handwritten answers, and no inclusion of photographs)

You can test this out on our Moodle assessment practice site. There are options for both Turnitin enabled assessments, as well as practice assessments without Turnitin enabled.