UTSA Academic Innovation

Turnitin (TII) FAQs

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Overview

Turnitin is a comprehensive tool that helps maintain the originality of student work by comparing submissions against an extensive database of academic content, web pages, and student papers. The similarity reports generated by Turnitin highlight matching text and provide a similarity score, enabling faculty to quickly identify potential instances of plagiarism.

Creating an assignment in Originality, Similarity and SimCheck.

  1. Navigate to the course you would like to add the assignment to.
  2. From the left-hand navigation, select Assignments and then select the+ Assignment button.
Screenshot of the "Assignments" section in an online course management system with menu options and assignment details.

3. Enter an Assignment Name, into the field provided and customize the following assignment settings:

  • Group assignment
  • Peer reviews
  • Moderated grading
  • Points
  • Assignment group
  • Display grade as

4. For Submission Type select Online from the drop-down. Then, check the boxes for Text Entry or File Uploads(or both).

Interface showing submission type options with "Online" selected and "File Uploads" checked.

5. If you want to ensure that students are submitting file in which Turnitin can generate a similarity report, choose to Restrict Upload File Types to readable text files such as pdf, doc, docx, pptx, etc.

6. Select your integration name from the Plagiarism Review drop-down menu.

Screenshot of Turnitin settings panel with options for similarity reports and indexing.

Accessing the Similarity Report

The Similarity Report can be accessed from within SpeedGrader.

  1. Select the assignment name and open Speedgrader from the link in the right sidebar.
     
Canvas page showing options: SpeedGrader, Download Submissions, and grading progress."
  1. Select the Similarity Score, indicated by the colored square under Submitted Files on the right, to open the Similarity Report.
     
Screenshot of a digital platform displaying an essay submission for grading, with submission details and document interface.

3. You can also access the report through Gradebook, by selecting the assignment where you would enter a grade, and selecting the arrow button on the right.
 

Canvas gradebook with "Narrative Essay" out of 100.

4. A side panel will open on the right which will then provide a link to Speedgrader.

 

Canvas gradebook screenshot with a focus on the link to Speedgrader.

Understanding the Similarity Score

Turnitin does not check for plagiarism in writing. We do check all submissions against our database. If any text in a submission is similar to one of our sources, these matches are highlighted for you to review.

It is perfectly natural for a submission to match against some of our database. Our database includes billions of web pages: both current and archived content from the internet, a repository of works students have submitted to Turnitin in the past, and a collection of documents, which comprises thousands of periodicals, journals, and publications.

Even when a submission has quotation marks and references, the quoted text will show as a match. The similarity score is simply the percentage of text in a submission that matched to other sources. Use this as a tool within your review process to make your own determination if any academic misconduct is present.

Similarity score percentage ranges

The color of the report icon indicates the submission’s similarity score, based on the amount of matching text found. The percentage range is 0% to 100%. The colors for similarity ranges are:

Green: 0% matching text

Blue: 1-24% matching text

Yellow: 25-49% matching text

Orange: 50-74% matching text

Red: 75-100% matching text

Where does Turn It In pull From?

  • Scholarly Publications

Use to: Allow researchers and students to easily compare original work against published works from around the world.

  • Internet Archive

Use to: Compare matches against individual internet sources to easily see potential copy and paste plagiarism.

  • Global Student Papers Database

Use to: Discourage student collusion, the most common form of plagiarism, when comparing against 20 years

of student papers.

When is text similarity expected?

When a student includes:

  • Quotes
  • References and citations
  • Common facts or facts that can’t be paraphrased

(eg. “Plagiarism is presenting someone else's work or ideas as your own.”)

When assignments include:

  • An expectation of supporting arguments
  • Templated material
  • Essay prompts or short answer questions

Support

For support, email [email protected], call 210-458-4520, or book a consultation with our TLDT experts.

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