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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.
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What percentage of similarity is 'acceptable'?
The similarity score alone doesn't show if your paper has plagiarism. The higher the score, the more text you have the same as other sources in your paper. For example, if your score is 15% and that text matches another student's work without citation, that's plagiarism. Furthermore, if you have a score of 10% but no-intext citations that would be poor academic writing. When reviewing your report, consider: How many matches are there? What do they match (ideally textbooks or journal articles)? And have you added references to acknowledge your sources?
How can I use Turnitin to my advantage?
How can I interpret Turnitin Similarity Report?
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 percentage of the overall similarity). An example is shown in the below screenshot.
How to rework your draft to reduce similarity?
- Use direct quotes sparingly and with double quotation marks (“…”) and reference correctly.
- Re-write or paraphrase the highlighted matched content, and reference correctly.
- Check if the similarity is 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, SLS resources or book a consultation with a Learning 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 on how to acknowledge and reference AI How do I acknowledge and reference AI?
- Do not copy and paste from AI.
- The student must not upload their assignment to any random AI checker website online as this may risk their work from being compromised or having 100% match.
- Student should save the sources they have used in their assignment as evidence of work.
- Student should save different versions of their draft assignment so that they can show the progress of their work.
Turnitin and AI writing detection
Turnitin has a tool that can identify material, which has been 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.
