Turnitin is an originality-checking and plagiarism-prevention service that checks writing for citation mistakes or inappropriate copying. Turnitin compares submitted papers to a massive database of student work, websites, books, and articles. Turnitin has several key features to meet your writing assignment needs:
Develops independent learners and confident writers: Turnitin helps students improve their academic writing and research skills.
Compares against content collections: Turnitin has a massive database that covers writing across the internet, scholarly articles, student papers, and more.
Important Resources
Turnitin Video for Instructors
TIPS has created a video just for instructors at CU Denver
Training Video
Rewatch this 1 hour training about Using Canvas for Grading that includes topics on Turnitin at the 35 minute mark of the video.
Turnitin Resources for Students
Turnitin has created a site outlining Turnitin resources specifically for students
Turnitin Resources
Turnitin provides detailed resources for all aspects of the tool.
Training & Support
TIPS is offering several opportunities to learn more about Turnitin. Join one of our group training sessions or schedule a one-on-one with our team for more guidance on how to understand similarity reports, Turnitin results, creating more rigorous assignments, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
From within the Assignments tool in your course, create new assignment by clicking the + Assignment button.
Set the assignment’s Submission Type to Online, then choose the appropriate Online Entry Options for the assignment. Select File Uploads for documents being uploaded by students.
Scroll down to the Plagiarism Review selection field. Select Turnitin from the dropdown menu.
A number of Turnitin-specific options will be displayed with default settings. It is recommended to leave these default settings as they are unless specific assignment needs require you to do otherwise.
Use the Store submissions in dropdown menu to change whether or not your students’ submissions will be stored in the Standard Paper Repository. This is the collection of documents against which submissions are compared to create an Originality Report.
Check the Compare submissions against options to modify the types of documents against which your students’ submissions are compared.
Check specific exclusions for the Similarity Reports generated by Turnitin.
Check Save as default settings to use your custom settings on future Turnitin assignments.
Use the Show originality report to students dropdown menu to select when students can see Similarity Reports for their assignments.
Once students have submitted assignments to Canvas, you can view similarity reports in the SpeedGrader application. Click on the assignment you wish to grade, then click on SpeedGrader in the right-hand column.
No. Turnitin is software that identifies the matched material by checking the electronically submitted documents against its database of academic publications, internet, and previously submitted documents. Turnitin provides a “similarity index,” which does not mean plagiarism.
Yes. Turnitin's search engine gathers content from websites based on the ISO-8559-1 character set (Latin script). Therefore, you may submit papers composed in Latin script regardless of language. Please note that the Turnitin system does not translate documents to detect matching text.
Division for Teaching Innovation and Program Strategy (TIPS)
CU Denver
City Heights/Learning Commons
1191 Larimer St
3rd Floor Learning Commons
Denver,CO 80204
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