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An Introduction to Turnitin
- Eoin Meade
- Abigail Myers
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a third-party service that matches text from student assignments against its extensive databases of current and archived internet content, student work previously submitted to Turnitin, periodicals, journals, and publications. Turnitin produces a similarity report and a score (%) of matched text.
Turnitin is a text matching tool, not a plagiarism detection tool.
Turnitin provides a useful indicator to markers of the extent of matched text within a document, but it cannot determine what those matches mean. It is no replacement for academic knowledge and judgment in determining cases of academic misconduct/plagiarism.
Turnitin can also be used for marking and feedback. For more information on this, please see the Turnitin as a marking and feedback tool section.
How does Turnitin work?
Turnitin can be enabled when setting up a Moodle Assignment activity. When students submit work to such an assignment activity, it will automatically be submitted to Turnitin.
Turnitin accepts a wide range of file types but can only create a similarity report if the file contains text. Files must also be under 100MB in size, or under 2MB if they only contain text. They must contain at least 20 words and be under 800 pages long. To check which file types are currently accepted, please refer to Turnitin’s File requirements page.
Turnitin will check submitted work for text matches against its databases and produce a similarity report and score (%). When the similarity report is ready, the percentage score will show in the submissions table of the Moodle assignment. Clicking on the percentage score icon will open up the similarity report in Turnitin’s Feedback Studio. Here, you can review the similarity report and identify text matches and the source of those matches.
To ensure you don’t experience issues when accessing Turnitin we recommend that you use Chrome, Firefox or Safari (on a Mac) and stay up to date with the latest versions.
Using Turnitin to develop students' academic writing
The LSE policy on the use of Turnitin requires all “Departments (in which students engage with essay-based assessments) to offer their students the opportunity to use Turnitin to help them develop their writing, referencing, paraphrasing and citation skills”.
Allowing students to access and use their similarity reports provides them with an opportunity to identify where their use of citations, referencing and paraphrasing requires development. To learn how to allow students access to their similarity reports, please see our guide How to enable Turnitin similarity reports within Moodle assignment activities. How frequently you allow students access to similarity reports is decided at departmental level, as set out in the LSE policy on the use of Turnitin.
Students will only be able to make effective use of this access if they have received appropriate training in citing and referencing, and using and interpreting a similarity report. Both are covered by LSE LIFE’s academic integrity unit:
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These pages are created by the LSE Digital Education Team and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License CC BY-SA 4.0