Turnitin for Instructors

Turnitin is a tool that helps instructors identify potential plagiarism in student assignment submissions. By comparing student work against a vast database of academic publications, websites, and previously submitted papers in other courses, Turnitin highlights text that matches existing sources. This allows instructors to review and evaluate the originality of student work and ensure academic integrity within their courses.

How do I request Turnitin for my course?

Contact the learning technologist or instructional designer assigned to your course OR contact CTET Studio to see if Turnitin can be used in your course. Turnitin can only be enabled in a course before the course starts and Turnitin is limited to courses in certain programs.

The university has some requirements for courses that have Turnitin enabled. These will be added by CTET, so nothing needs to be done by you the instructor.

Text is added to the course overview book letting students know that Turnitin is being used in this course and that they can opt out of Turnitin.
A draft assignment activity is added to the course that students can use to “test” assignment drafts. As the instructor, you can ignore this.
Text is added to each assignment activity that has Turnitin enabled indicating this to students.

How does it work?

When students submit work to a Moodle assignment activity with Turnitin enabled, a similarity percentage will appear alongside their submissions. This percentage indicates how much of the submission matches content in Turnitin’s database.

Matches can include commonly used phrases and, depending on the assignment settings, may also include quoted text and reference lists. Block quotes are often included in the similarity score, since they typically do not appear in quotation marks and may not be excluded automatically.

Turnitin does not compare submissions within the same course, but it does compare work submitted in other courses. Occasionally, a student may accidentally submit an assignment to the wrong course. Even if the student deletes that submission after realizing the mistake, it may still appear in Turnitin’s database and be flagged as a match in future submissions in other courses.

Clicking on the percentage will open this student submission in Turnitin’s Feedback Studio.

Feedback Studio

Feedback Studio allows you to navigate the similarity report. You can review the matches and determine if they are an issue. You can also determine what sources are matching (e.g., journals, books, websites, etc.).

Feedback Layer

We recommend using Moodle (not Turnitin) to both grade and provide student feedback. Instructions on using this layer will not be included in this article.

Similarity Layer

The similarity layer indicates which parts of the document are similar to documents from other sources. The similarity layer includes the following panels/buttons:

Flags For Review

Automatically identifies unusual patterns in a submission that may indicate further review is needed. For example, if a submission has attempted to manipulate the text by replacing characters or using hidden text to avoid similarity detection. These flags do not confirm plagiarism but highlight areas that may need closer examination.

Match Overview

Shows all matches found, ordered by highest similarity match to lowest. The 11% in the example below is the percentage of the document that matches with sources in the Turnitin database.

From Match Overview, selecting a source shows the number of matches for that source. In the example below, selecting the source doczz.net shows that there are 3 matches, and selecting the small arrow to the left or right of "Match 1 of 3" will cycle through the three matches.

From Match Overview, selecting the arrow to the right of a source will take you to the Match Breakdown panel, listing URLs matching with the document.

Selecting a URL in the Match Overview will show the match in the document and clicking on the link will take you to the URL of the match.

All Sources

All Sources shows sources for all matches found.

Selecting a source will show all the matches for that source, and selecting a match will show where the match appears in the document.

If you’d like to exclude a source, select the Exclude Sources button at the bottom, select the check mark next to the source you’d like to exclude and select the Exclude button at the bottom. You can use the Excluded Sources panel to restore review and restore excluded sources.

Filters and Settings

Filters and Settings allows you to enable filters to exclude certain types of matches such as those matching quotes, bibliography, or phrases of fewer than a certain number of words.

Excluded Sources

Shows sources that you have excluded and allows you to restore those sources. Sources can be excluded from the All Sources panel.