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Set up Turnitin within an assignment
Why use it?
Turnitin matches text from student assignments against its extensive databases of previously submitted student coursework, websites and academic papers. Turnitin’s originality check produces an originality report and a score (% ) for deterring and detecting potential plagiarism. Using Turnitin in Moodle enables teachers to view originality reports and scores directly from within Moodle. All you have to do, is create an Assignment for individual student submissions in your Moodle course and enable Turnitin in the settings. Originality reports will then be produced for all student submissions to this assignment, and will be shown in Moodle next to the submissions.
Step 1: Add an Assignment
Go to the course page and Turn editing on. Scroll to the section where you want your assignment to be displayed, click Add an activity or resource and pick Assignment.
Go to the Edit settings of the assignment.
Step 2: Settings
Set up an assignment, see the create an Assignment for individual student submissions guide for more info on the main settings. The settings under Turnitin plagiarism plugin settings can be seen below.
Enable Turnitin
Select Yes to enable Turnitin. N.B. You must enable Turnitin on assignments before any submissions are made if you want those files to have originality reports generated for them.
Display Originality Reports to students
Decide whether you want to allow students to view their originality reports. If you select Yes you may want to send students some guidance on how to interpret their originality report.
Store student papers
Decide whether you want submissions to be stored in the repository or not. This means the student’s submission is stored permanently on the Turnitin database, and work of other students at LSE and other institutions will be checked against it going forward. This is useful for final submissions so Standard Repository should always be used for summative work; but if the student is submitting formative work that might be developed for future assignments then it is advisable to leave it as No Repository, otherwise they will get a report showing self-plagiarism on the later assignment.
Check against stored student papers, internet, journals periodicals and publications
Make your choice of what checks should be made on the submissions – you must choose at least one but typically you will choose Yes for all three.
Report Generation Speed
Select the requirement that meets your needs. If you are allowing students to view their originality reports then you should also let them resubmit and we would recommend using the setting
Generate reports immediately (students can submit until due date)
even if student cannot view their reports.
The last set of options relate to Turnitin’s matching process. The student’s originality score might be artificially increased if the bibliography and quoted material are not excluded. However, the student also has the option to exclude these when they view the report.
Exclude bibliography
Recommend set to Yes because it is likely to show up 100% as it is almost definitely cited elsewhere.
Exclude quoted material
Recommend set to Yes as lots of student work will include quotes, and they will automatically exist elsewhere (so again Turnitin will flag them as matches). Most referencing protocols ask that any quote of over 25 words is placed as a separate block of text – so this setting will stop these from being matched.
Exclude small matches
This is useful to exclude common phrases that are likely to turn up in everyone’s submission e.g. in the title and in other sources against which papers are matched. If you choose this option, then we recommend you select Words and specify a number of words up to which matches will be ignored.
There is no limit to how big or small plagiarism can be and Turnitin tends to round up to the nearest whole percent, so if you are excluding small matches based on percentage it is best only to set this at 1%.
Carry on with any other assignment settings and remember to Save and display at the bottom.
Students use of Turnitin
When students use Turnitin for the first time, they will be asked to accept the terms and conditions of the service.
It is essential they accept this otherwise their file will not be submitted to Turnitin for checking: if you are enabling Turnitin on one of your assignments for the first time, we recommend you advise your students to expect this message and to accept it.
Further resources
For more information on Turnitin at LSE, including guides on how to interpret Turnitin originality reports for teachers and students, see our Turnitin web page. You may also want to visit Turnitin FAQs.