Digital skills

Key Points Turnitin is a software program that helps students and staff review work for plagiarism. Turnitin will highlight any text that matches a range of online sources including the internet, electric journals, books and other student assignments. Turnitin then creates a similarity score indicating the percentage of the assignment that is found in other sources for your educator (and yourself) to review. Students should check the score to see if they need to paraphrase or add citations.

What it Turnitin? 

Turnitin is used at ECA-HE to help students avoid plagiarism and learn about academic integrity. All assignments submitted on Canvas are automatically uploaded to Turnitin. The software will then checks your work by comparing it to internet sources, books, journals, and other students’ work. Turnitin generates a report called a "similarity report" which shows any matched content and the percentage of similarity with other sources.  We highly recommend reviewing this report before submitting your final assessment.

How can I use Turnitin to my advantage? 

The report provides an overall breakdown of similarity ('matching') between a submitted work and published content. The Similarity Report highlights where the matches are (with colour codes) and indicates how similar your writing is compared to the sources (as a percentage of the overall similarity). An example is shown in the screenshot below.

How to rework your draft to reduce similarity?

• Use direct quotes sparingly, and enclose them in double quotation marks (“…”) and reference them correctly.
• Re-write or paraphrase the highlighted matched content, and ensure it is referenced properly.
• Check if the similarity is coming from reference list entries in the Similarity Report.
• Submit your work through Turnitin before the due date and allow sufficient time for revision if required. 
• Get assistance from your lecturer/tutor, consult SLS resources, or book a consultation with a Learning Advisor if needed.

How can students avoid being reported for inappropriate use of AI tools?

• Students must declare and acknowledge the use of any AI in assessments. Check this link for guidance: How do I Acknowledge and Reference AI?
• Do not copy and paste from AI.
• Do not upload your assignment to random AI checker websites online, as this may compromise your work or result in a 100% match.
• Students should save the sources they have used in their assignment as evidence of work.
• Students should save different versions of their draft assignment so that they can show the progress of their work.

Turnitin and AI writing detection

Turnitin includes a tool that can detect material likely written by artificial intelligence software, such as ChatGPT. Currently, this tool is only available in staff view. It may lead to further investigation of your submission.