Cedarville University (CU) provides all faculty and students access to TurnItIn to help improve writing and prevent plagiarism. TurnItIn accepts user documents and compares them to material located on the Internet and in TurnItIn’s document repository. After the documents are compared, TurnItIn produces the Similarity Report which shows the parts of a student’s paper that are similar to other sources. Here are three tips to help you read the Similarity Report.
Tip 1: Familiarize yourself with what Canvas and TurnItIn can do
Get up to speed with all of the functionality the Canvas and TurnItIn integration has to offer by viewing or downloading the Canvas Plagiarism Framework Teacher Guide. While this guide may cover more than you need, it is a great resource to bookmark or download to your favorite electronic brain (e.g., Evernote, OneNote, Devonthink, etc. — OneNote is free for CU faculty, staff, and students). Check it out when you get a chance.
Tip 2: Have TurnItIn ignore bibliography/reference sections and quoted materials
When setting up your assignment, have TurnItIn ignore the bibliography/reference sections and quoted materials. You can edit the settings for your particular assignment by following the Customizing the Similarity Report instructions. You and your learners will receive a more reliable report devoid of false matches.
Tip 3: Learn how to accurately interpret the Similarity Report
Learn to quickly spot problems by reading the information from TurnItIn on accurately Interpreting the Similarity Report. If you have followed Tip 2, you may want to investigate scores of 15% or more. This percentage threshold is only a rule of thumb. It should not be used as a criteria for automatically spotting plagiarism. Your results may vary, and you may find that you can filter even more false positives to increase the score accuracy. Check out this information from TurnItIn on Customizing the Similarity Report to filter out those false positives.
Conclusion
We will be talking about TurnItIn and plagiarism more in upcoming posts, but by using the tips above, you will be well on your way to using TurnItIn more efficiently and helping your students avoid plagiarism. For now, do you have further questions about using TurnItIn? Leave a comment below!
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5 Comments
Nina Sekerak
How do I get TurnItIn to compare student papers to articles from ACS journals? I have not been able to find the information on either the Canvas or TurnItIn community help pages (or in the link above). The fellow on Canvas chat stated that he could not help me. I could not find an email address at which to contact TurnItIn.
Lauren Eissler
Hi Nina!
You can have TurnItIn compare student papers against journals when you choose the comparison repositories. These options are under the “Compare submissions against” heading on the assignment settings page in Canvas. The third option under this heading is “Periodicals, journals and publications” – if you have the box checked for that item, TurnItIn will compare the submission against journals, including ACS journals.
Nina Sekerak
Hello, Lauren,
I do not see the ACS publisher listed for TurnItIn’s repository in the field of chemistry: https://www.turnitin.com/about/content. Would you please let me know where you found the inclusion of ACS journals in their repository?
Thank you!
Nina
Lauren Eissler
Hi Nina!
The page you directed me to on TurnItIn’s website seems to list the topics/disciplines that they include in their database. I didn’t see a full list of journals on their website. They do say that they include the top scholarly content from all disciplines and they have 91% of the top 10,000 journals in their database.
I also ran a quick test in Canvas. I pulled a paragraph word-for-word from an ACS article and submitted it as a Test Student in a TurnItIn assignment in my sandbox course. The submission came back fully highlighted and labeled with the citation from the ACS article. If you would like, I can email you screenshots of my test!
Nina Sekerak
Thank you, Lauren; that is helpful! I simply could not find the answer nor a contact to ask for help.