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. 

Does the University use text matching software to detect plagiarism and how are the reports used?

The University of Canberra uses text-matching software to help students and staff reduce plagiarism and improve understanding of academic integrity. Where the text matching software indicates that the student’s submission (either in part or whole) has similarities to the work of another, the text matching report may be one indicator of academic misconduct. The University is shifting from the current text matching software, Ouriginal, to Turnitin. 

How does Turnitin Work?

As per the Turnitin Website, Turnitin compares student submissions against an ever-expanding database of internet pages including archived pages that may no longer be available, a subscription repository of periodicals, journals, publications, as well as previously submitted student work. 

What is a Similarity Report?

As per the Turnitin Website, the Similarity Report includes a similarity score which is the percentage of the submission matching other sources. The score does not assess whether part or all of the submission has been plagiarised but is a tool for instructors and students to easily find matches or similar text within submitted work.  

Similarity scores in the report are colour coded based on the amount of matching or similar text found: 

When identifying academic misconduct there is no minimum similarity score that is of concern, for example a green similarity score may result from several sentences being copied and pasted for another source without appropriate referencing but as a percentage of the whole submission the copied section is less than 24%.  

Find out more through watching the video below or clicking on this link to download a guide.

How do I use Turnitin as a student?

Students will continue to submit their work in the same way, for example via a UCLearn (Canvas) Assignment drop box or via the Cadmus platform (where relevant for particular units). 

When I submit more than four (4) drafts the Similarity Report won’t appear, why?

If resubmissions have been enabled for the assessment, Turnitin will process the first four submissions and provide the Similarity Report immediately. After 3 resubmissions, a new Similarity Report will take 24 hours to generate to prevent misuse of the system and encourage good academic writing practices.

If you are submitting on the due date and are close to the final submission time, please be aware that the most recently submitted file that is not overdue will be conceded as your formal submission.

Do students retain copyright over the material submitted?

Yes! When you submit your assessment, your submission will be added to the Turnitin database, and you will provide Turnitin with a perpetual license (permission) to store and use the submission for the purposes of text similarity review only. However, you retain ownership of the content of your submissions, including your intellectual property. It is also important to understand that Turnitin will not provide or display the content of your submission to any third party. 

I’ve heard that Turnitin has an artificial intelligence ‘AI’ detection feature, will UC be using that?

Turnitin has an AI detection feature. This will report to teaching staff what portion of the submission is suspected of being written by artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT, and highlight this text 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 for the assessment.