What is Turnitin? 

Turnitin is software that matches submitted text in student assessment submissions against material from various sources: the internet, published books and journals, and previously submitted student texts. Turnitin helps students improve their academic writing skills by helping students to identify accidental plagiarism and providing instructors with tools to provide useful feedback and identify potential breaches. 

Availability of Turnitin?

UC has implemented Turnitin for learning and teaching across the University in 2024, replacing Ouriginal.

Turnitin is automatically included in each assignment submission drop box in UCLearn (Canvas).

Using Turnitin

You can access your Turnitin text-matching report through your UCLearn teaching site through following step-by-step instructions below:

1. Click on Assignments on the navigation menu.
2. Click on the assignment that has been submitted to Turnitin.
3. Click on Submission details on the right-hand side of the screen.
4. Click on the name of the submitted file to access the file.
5. Click on the Turnitin percentage assessment to access the Turnitin report (the percentage will appear in a coloured box).

Using Turnitin for draft text matching

You can submit a draft assignment for text matching through your unit's assignment submission box.

Assignment submission boxes should only be used for the unit for which you will submit the final assignment. If you submit an assignment (of your own, or one that belongs to another student) into a submission box for a different unit, it will be matched against the final submission for the other unit and you will receive a high percentage text-match and may be considered to have breached the University’s Academic Integrity policy.

While you are finalising your draft assignment, you can submit an assignment more than once and check the Turnitin report, each time.  However, for subsequent submissions, you will need to allow up to 48 hours for Turnitin to analyse a document before producing a report.

Understanding your Turnitin report

The following guide from Turnitin will assist you to understand your Turnitin Report, click on the heading below to access this guide:

• Student overview of the new Similarity Report experienceLinks to an external site.

Turnitin AI Writing Detection Tool

The AI Writing detection tool is a feature of the Turnitin Similarity report that teaching staff have access to.  The tool gives an indication of how much of the submission (as a percentage of the qualifying text) is suspected of being generated by artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT, and highlights the suspected text generated by GenAI within the submission.

Detection results cannot be used as the only indicator that GenAI has been used in written work. However, unit conveners may initiate a learning validation conversation based on the AI Writing detection report to validate that the student can demonstrate the associated learning outcomes.

Turnitin FAQs