Turnitin/Originality offers a familiar experience with detailed online reports, color-coded matches, text manipulation detection, filters, and side-by-side source comparison for easy interpretation. Many of the features of Turnitin/Similarity will be familiar to those who used Unicheck.

If utilized in an assignment that requires a file submission, below is a list of what Turnitin/Similarity will be reporting on.

Similarity flagging - See anomalies or other indicators of concern such as text modifications intended to trick algorithms:
- White or extremely tiny fonts
- Latin and Cyrillic characters
- Excessive quotes
Self-plagiarism
Exclusions

Additional features of Turnitin previously not found in Unicheck

Synonym swapping
Student collusion detection
- By default checked papers will be indexed and available to our community while protecting privacy
AI writing detection

Self-exclusion filter

If you choose to allow students to view their report prior to the due date students will have the opportunity to resubmit the assignment with a goal to improve their score. Turnitin automatically excludes papers that have been submitted to any assignment in the same class by the same student. This guarantees that any previous draft submissions to the same assignment don’t impact the Similarity score of a student’s most up-to-date paper.

Search Methods

search methods

Student View

Before a student can submit a document they will need to acknowledge that the work they are submitting is their own original work as shown below highlighted in red.

I agree student pledge hightlighted

Originality Report

To access the detailed Originality report for each student navigate to the speed grader for the assignment being assessed. You will know that the report is ready for review by a colored Similarity score as shown highlighted in red. You will click the score results to view the detailed report.

score highlighted

-Sample Report/Classic View-

full sample report

Located to the right of the detailed report (classic view) are three tabs of which you can click to review a detailed report on Flags as well as AI. The report initially displays the overall score. In this example the overall Similarity score was an acceptable 15%. However, it also correctly recognized that the submitted paper was created entirely with ChatGPT. You might be wondering as I was, how could a paper that was deemed acceptable also be 100% AI generated? The answer I received from Turnitin was slightly disappointing, they claim that they do different things.

0 flags 15% overall 100% AI report details

Originality Score

Blue: No matching text
Green: One word to 24% matching
Yellow: 25%-49% matching text
Orange: 50%-74% matching
Red: 75% and over match

color scores

grade book with green icon

The Originality Score is the percentage of matching text found in the Turnitin reporting. The higher the percent the more matching text was found. When in the grade book or in the speed grader color coding shows at a glance the overall percent of matching text.

What is a Good Score?

It depends – The paper on the left only returned a 5% score. You might say, it's better than a score of 30%. What is at issue however is the sample with 5%, the first paragraph was copied and pasted in whole. Whereas with the paper on the right that scored 30%, items text matched include the essay prompt, a citation, a quote etc. In this example there are no large sections of plagiarized text and what was matched are acceptable and understandable with no large sections of copied text.

sample report

Report Download

You may find that you need to download a report for purposes of sharing. Located on the bottom left of the detailed report is a “share” button. Clicking share will give you the choice to print or download.

You might consider adding a sentence at the bottom of an assignment notifying students that this assignment will be reviewed for plagiarism (example) “This assignment will be checked with Turnitin Originality”.

report

Analysis Availability

There are many nuanced features in our writing that indicate a unique style that may not be obvious when reading a single document. Turnitin gathers data about how each file has been written and presents them together for further analysis to our administrators. With our Turnitin admin tools we have the ability to look for inconsistencies with spelling, readability, and use of vocabulary. Variation in subject matter and length can produce notably different results from the same author. Please reach out to the EdTech team if you would like an investigation opened on a student. A customized, detailed evaluation of submissions from a single student is available.