Turnitin for Students

Submitting your document to Turnitin provides machine-generated feedback on grammar and spelling, and a similarity report showing which sections of your document match other sources such as journals, books, and websites. This feedback provides you with an opportunity to improve your document. The Turnitin similarity report helps you avoid plagiarism, which is the act of presenting the ideas or works of another as your own. For more information on plagiarism refer to Academic integrity for students.

As a student using Turnitin at RRU, you will automatically have access to Turnitin through select assignments in Moodle if Turnitin is enabled in your course.

Before submitting an assignment to a Moodle Assignment activity that has Turnitin enabled, you will be able to submit a draft to Turnitin and act on the feedback.

For support with appropriately attributing the work of others, refer to Quoting, Summarizing, and Paraphrasing. If you'd like further support contact the Writing Centre.

If you're unsure whether specific matched text constitutes plagiarism contact your instructor.

Continue on to see how you can submit a draft of your assignment to Turnitin.

Submitting Your Draft For Turnitin Feedback

• Navigate to the Moodle assignment activity in your course that is intended for submission of your draft for Turnitin feedback, as described in the assignment description. This may be called “Draft Submissions For Turnitin Feedback”.

• Submit your assignment to the Moodle assignment activity as you normally would: select the Add Submission button, add the file, and select the Save Changes button.

• Once your assignment has been submitted it will show Turnitin: Status Queued.

• Returning to the assignment submission after a few minutes it will show a Turnitin ID.

• Open

  

  Once Turnitin processes your submission a similarity score will be assigned. The example below shows  a similarty score of 11%, which means that 11% of this submission was found to be similar to other sources.  Select the similarity score to open Feedback Studio to the similarity layer.
  By default, the first three submissions to a Moodle Assignment activity with Turnitin enabled will be processed by Turnitin quickly (usually less than 20 minutes) while following submissions will take 24 hours.

If your instructor has used Turnitin to grade or provide feedback, you'll also see the GradeMark icon. Select the GradeMark icon to open Feedback Studio to the instructor feedback layer.

Feedback Studio

Feedback Studio allows you to navigate the instructor feedback, similarity report, and the grammar and spelling feedback.

Layers

Selecting the Layers button will expand the Active Layers panel. Layers can be toggled between activated and deactivated (hidden) by either selecting the layer button for the layer or by selecting the checkmark when the Active Layers panel is open.

When a layer is deactivated the layer button wil appear black.

GRADING / INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK LAYER

The grading / instructor feedback layer shows instructor feedback in the form of comments throughout the document.

SIMILARITY LAYER

The similarity layer indicates which parts of the document are similar to documents from other sources.

E-RATER - GRAMMAR AND TOOLS LAYER

The grammer and tools layer will provide feedback on grammar and spelling.

Instructor Feedback

Selecting the Instructor Feedback button will toggle the Instructor Feedback panel. If the instructor is using a Turnitin rubric you'll be able to see it here. If the instructor has used Turnitin to provide an overall comment on the submission it will appear under in the Text Comment box.

Match Overview

The Match Overview panel 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 external sources such as journals, books, and websites. Depending on the filter settings, these matches could be in your quotes or bibliography. Matches within quotes and the bibliography can usually be ignored. Commonly used phrases that are not presenting another's work as your own such as "The main research question is" will also often match, and this is usually fine. Carefully consider matches that aren't within quotes or your bibliography, as you may have paragraphrasing issues, matches that should be quoted and cited, or other issues. For more information on plagiarism refer to Academic integrity for students.

From Match Overview, selecing a source shows the number of matches for that source. In the example below, selecting the source http://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 your document.

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

All Sources

The All Sources panel 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.

Filters and Settings

The Filters and Settings panel 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. You may decide to fil

e-rater Grammer and Tools

On the e-rater panel you can toggle the visibility of feedback on grammar, mechanics, style, usage, and spelling. Grammar is shown in the screenshot below, but scroll down to access the others.

Note that e-rater has a limit of 64,000 characters; submissions over this limit will not provide e-rater feedback.