Quick Tips: Turnitin

Quick Tips: Turnitin

QUICK TIPS: TURNITIN

The link to Turnitin will be available on your Moodle page (there will be a link to upload your assignment). Uploading document into Turnitin does not mean that we are submitting it to our lecturers. Turnitin is our helper: it checks our assignment and it will tell us if we are accidentally engaged in plagiarism.

The originality report will come in colour and percentage: Blue (most original) to red (least original). Due to the vast information uploaded in the Internet, it is almost impossible to have 0% originality (blue).Do not panic if your report comes with a colour brighter than yellow!If you are sure that you did not “copy and paste” others’ work, stay calm…

The high percentage might be due to the reference list in your document…

Or you might not have referenced it properly; for example, the quoted parts were not detected as quotations due to the difference in referencing system.

Here is an example of an assignment with reported36% similarity:

D mentor images first result png

QUICK TIPS: TURNITIN

After you click on this icon, this will appear:D mentor images apply filters png

You can tick on the boxes to exclude quotes or bibliography:

QUICK TIPS: TURNITIN

Notice the different result in percentage after both the boxes have been ticked:

The previous 36% similarity has been reduced into only 4% similarity.

On the other hand, greens are not always safe!

Even if your similarity report returns with small percentage, any big chunk of highlighted textmeans there is a risk of plagiarism. It either means that you are not paraphrasingproperly or that you might have accidentally duplicated it from somewhere.

If there are only several words in a sentence that are highlighted then it issafe but if the whole sentence or several sentences in a row are highlighted, then you will need to review it and paraphrase the highlighted parts or acknowledge the source as references.Using the Turnitin report tool as a guide is great way to edit your work.

‘Can we upload it again to see the new originality report?’

Yes! You can submit the same document more than once. However, up from the second submission, the report will arrive in more than 24 hours. It is advised to allow plenty of time before the due date to use Turnitin.