Teach with Turnitin

We recommend using Turnitin as a proactive teaching tool rather than a reactive, punitive one.

Turnitin is a “similarity check” tool you can enable in Canvas assignments to identify text in student papers that matches websites, publications, and other student papers in the Turnitin database. This document shows you how to enable Turnitin on your assignments, what you will see when your student has submitted a Turnitin-enabled assignment, and how to view the Turnitin similarity scores.

Resources

• Using Turnitin to Teach Students Not to Plagiarize – good testimony from an educator in Inside Higher Ed
• Turnitin: Teaching Best Practices – mostly a step-by-step guide but has some helpful info about using it with rough drafts. Also has a simple Interpreting Results area.
• Plagiarism – Lesson presentation – from Turnitin. They have a downloadable PowerPoint, guided notes, a poster, and a handout.
• The Plagiarism Spectrum 2.0 from Turnitin.
• Using Turnitin to Teach Students About Plagiarism – from UW Madison. Addresses the how and why of Turnitin as well as the legal challenges.

Assignment Settings

Let your students know when you enable Turnitin on an assignment, when they can access their report, and how the similarity report is used concerning their grade (if at all). For example, let them know what similarity percentage is acceptable/unacceptable and what you would like them to do in response to the report.

1. Edit the applicable assignment.
2. Select Online and File Upload as the Submission type.
   
3. Select Turnitin as the Plagiarism Review option.
   
4. Select Standard paper repository and all three checkboxes in the Compare submissions against options.
   
5. OPTIONAL: Select your preferred Similarity Report options and default settings.
   NOTE: If you find students are receiving high similarity scores for common issues, such as quoted material, modify the following settings for the assignment.
   
6. RECOMMENDED: Select Immediately so students can see their reports right away.
   
7. Add due dates and Save or Save and Publish.

View Reports

Reports are usually available within minutes but can take 24 hours if it is a resubmission.

Access the assignment and click SpeedGrader.
NOTE: You will see the icon in the Grades tab, but it is not clickable.

Interpreting the Similarity Report for instructors.

Interpreting the Similarity Report for students.

Student View

Students see this message when they are submitting assignments with Turnitin enabled.

If they do not select the checkbox, they get this message.

We recommend letting students view their reports on the Grades tab. 

Students have the same ability as you to download their report .

AI Detection

We enabled AI detection in Turnitin at the end of the Fall 2023 semester. We know the issue of unsanctioned AI use is a serious concern and creates a substantial challenge in assessing students’ learning, but because of concerns about AI detection tool accuracy, risks associated with false positives, student privacy concerns, and a lack of transparency around the functionality of AI detectors, use the results with caution.

We tested and received false positives where our own writings were ‘flagged’ as AI by Turnitin, as well as false negatives where some AI-generated text was not detected. This article, Guidance on AI Detection and Why We’re Disabling Turnitin’s AI Detector from the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, provides additional discussion and links to resources on this topic.