Turnitin Overview

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a text matching system that is used as a training tool as well as a plagiarism prevention tool. The main use of Turnitin is the creation of an “Originality or Similarity report” that compares text in a submitted assignment against a database of sources. It does not distinguish between accurately referenced material (which is totally acceptable in an assignment) and material that has been plagiarised. It does provide you as a student with a tool to ensure that all quotes or paraphrases are correctly referenced and allows you to revise your work to be more of your original thoughts and conclusions.

 Why is Morling using Turnitin?

  • Helps Morling as an institution be committed to Academic integrity and Excellence in Education
  • To help students develop their academic skills and ensure that students are aware of, and held to, the highest standards regarding proper research and citation.
  • Creates a more equitable way of identifying possible concerns with both NESB and English writers
  • To support lecturers and markers
    • Saves time by finding possible instances of plagiarism and highlights text matches
    • Can also be used by markers to give detailed, relevant feedback about research skills and writing process.

How does it work?

Your assignment is submitted through a Turnitin assignment on Moodle. An Originality Report is created before you submit your final submission. Once the due date has arrived you cannot submit again.

Assignments are compared against

  • Current and previous Internet sites
  • Published work from periodicals, journals, databases and some books.
  • Student assessment (own or other) submitted to Turnitin, from Morling as well as other institutions
  • Essays from cheat websites

 Some important information

Is there a similarity percentage that is considered safe?

  • There are no clear-cut rules, as all work will probably contain some words from other sources.
  • There will not be a target percentage – but high percentages will alert markers that you have over relied on other’s work (whether or not it is correctly referenced)

Quotations and referencing can be removed from Originality report

  • can be identified if put in double inverted commas “ ”
  • direct quotes should still be used sparingly (less than 15% of total word count)
  • Common words and phrases can be filtered (e.g. phrases in the question)

If the assignment is formative then you should expect matches to previous assignments. This is ok!