What is Turnitin?
TurnItIn is a service that matches text from student assignments against its extensive databases of current and archived internet content, student work previously have 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.
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. 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.
Turnitin for student development
Other pages in this section, include:
LSE’s policy on the use of Turnitin
Turnitin FAQs