Introduction to Turnitin Clarity

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This year, faculty has access to a new Turnitin feature – Turnitin Clarity – in addition to the standard Turnitin checker.

Clarity gives you a little more information about your students’ writing process by requiring students to write directly into the tool in Canvas (students cannot upload a file in Clarity). Because students are writing directly in the tool, you can see additional information such as the amount of time students spent writing, the number of sessions they used to write, what sections of text students copied/pasted in, as well as a timeline recording of edits made to their submission.

As you review the flags and data provided by Turnitin, remember that this is information given for you to consider and not definitive proof of AI usage or plagiarism. A student may copy information from their own personal notes and paste it in, which Turnitin will still flag. Turnitin will note a source for pasted material if it can find one, else it will be noted as “no source detected.” Other flags, such as a flag for minimal revisions made, could also just mean that students created a good outline and notes outside of Turnitin Clarity that they referenced as they wrote or had a good grasp of the topic before drafting.

How to set up Clarity

Turnitin Clarity can’t be added to existing assignments – you must create a new assignment using Turnitin on the assignments page (not the modules page) in your course.

On the assignments page:

Click the three dots button next to the “add assignment button” in the top right of the page.
Select “Turnitin” from the list.
Select the type of Turnitin assignment you want (we’ll reference settings specific for Turnitin Clarity below).
Choose the general settings you want for the Turnitin Clarity assignment, including start/due/feedback release dates and number of points.
Work your way through the rest of the settings options:
- Clarity – Choose if you want students to be able to access an AI chat tool while composing their submission (you will be able to see the entire chat while grading) and select how you want that chat to operate. You can also choose to enable a grammar check tool as well as a citation check tool. Finally, you can select whether students can view the writing report (shows timeline recording of writing, AI chat activity, and observations) after submission.
- Grading & Feedback – You can likely skip this section because this only applies if you grade in Clarity instead of SpeedGrader. You can grade students’ Clarity submissions in SpeedGrader and still view all the information or flags from Turnitin there while using your already-created Canvas rubrics.
- Submission settings – Choose if you want to allow late submissions or resubmissions.
- Report settings – Choose if you want students to view the similarity report, when the report should be generated, where submissions should be stored, what you want submissions to be checked against, and what the similarity report should ignore.
Click “Create assignment.”

If you want to use a Canvas rubric for grading, find the assignment you just created in your assignments list, click on it, then scroll to below the Turnitin information box to add a Canvas rubric.

Once your assignment is ready, you can publish it and add it to a module on your course’s modules page.

Resources

For further details about using Turnitin Clarity:

“Learn more about Turnitin Clarity” video
Canvas LTI 1.3 quickstart guide
- This guide walks through the same steps as above, but it also contains additional details, frequently asked questions, and screenshots of the process.