What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a web-based service that can help find and highlight matching or unoriginal text in a written
assignment.
You will usually be required to submit work via Turnitin and the Turnitin submission inbox will usually
be generated in our VLE – our virtual learning environment - Moodle.
Turnitin improves the student writing cycle by helping to prevent plagiarism, whether by accident or
design, and by providing rich feedback for our students.
Turnitin is the global leader in evaluating and improving student writing.
Turnitin processed over 80 million papers in 2012.
Turnitin is used by more than 10,000 institutions in 126 countries to manage the submission, tracking and
evaluation of student papers online.
Turnitin
Processed over 80 million papers in 2012
Used by more than 10,000 institutions in
126 countries
Turnitin uses data-mining technology to compile a large database of electronic academic materials which
it indexes and stores. Turnitin then generates an OriginalityCheck online.
NOW
How do we use Turnitin here at the UoB?
A Turnitin assignment is usually set up by a lecturer; students access this assignment online and upload
their work before the submission due date.
Turnitin will then analyse the submitted work to identify text matches with other sources, usually
completing this task within a few minutes. Sources checked include websites, books, journals and student
work that has previously been submitted to Turnitin.
Staff can view the work that has been submitted and there is also the facility to mark the work online and
include grades and comments
For each piece of submitted work, Turnitin provides an
OriginalityCheck which compares the paper's text to a vast database of over 24 billion pages of digital
content (including archived Internet content that is no longer available), over 300 million papers in the
student archive, as well as leading library databases and publications.
Turnitin
Compares against over 24 billion pages
300 million papers in student archive
Library databases and publications
OriginalityCheck helps staff check students work for improper citation or potential plagiarism and
provides both a
Similarity index, which indicates the
percentage of the submitted work that
Turnitin has identified as being matched
against other sources
and an Originality report which shows more details about each match found including the precise
location of the match.
We hope this information helps you in your understanding of Turnitin and its use here at the UoB, if you
require further information please check our Moodle Help Pages or speak to your course tutor.