Turnitin is text-matching software used by ATU to uphold academic integrity.
Turnitin is used as part of the assignment submission process at ATU to help students demonstrate academic integrity in their work by demonstrating how to use, create and communicate information in an original, honest, and responsible manner.
Turnitin identifies when texts are similar. Its purpose is to educate students about correct citation and referencing methods.
The purpose of Turnitin is to help students improve their academic writing techniques by highlighting similarities to other sources on the Internet and other students’ work enabling them to make decisions about the quality of their writing.
For example, has the student:
Relied too strongly on one source.
Paraphrased, summarized or quoted someone else’s work without referencing it.
Used no sources at all and thus their work is uncorroborated.
Turnitin should also help in reducing instances of plagiarism and improve overall academic integrity. It is a formative tool intended to help students. Students are encouraged, but not required, to follow up on the analysis it provides.
If a lecturer opts to use Turnitin for a course or assignment, the lecturer will create a 'Turnitin Assignment' within Blackboard or Moodle
When a student submits a 'Turnitin Assignment' within Blackboard or Moodle, the assignment will then be submitted to Turnitin for text-matching.
Turnitin matches the text within an assignment by comparing a student's submission against a database of electronic texts from the Internet, published works (such as journal articles and books), and assignments previously submitted to Turnitin by other students.
Turnitin then creates an 'Originality Report' which can be viewed by lecturers and students, which identifies where the text within a student submission has matched another source.
For more information see Turnitin's student quick start guide or the lecturer quick start guide.
Your lecturer will inform you if Turnitin is used for the course or module you are taking and you will typically summit your work to check it's originality via the VLE (Blackboard, Moodle).
Please note the library cannot give access to Turnitin.
Useful Turnitin guides for uploading your work:
Turnitin checks your submissions against their database to see if there are instances where your writing is similar to, or matches against, one of their sources, and will flag this for your lecturer to review.
It is normal for an assignment to match against some of their database. As long as you have referenced correctly, this is fine. The similarity score simply highlights any matching areas in your paper so your instructor can use this as an investigative tool to determine if the match is or is not acceptable.
The color of the report icon indicates the similarity score of the paper, based on the amount of matching or similar text that was uncovered. The percentage range is 0% to 100%. The possible similarity ranges are:
For more information see Turnitin's Interpreting the Similarity Report.