Turnitin

Turnitin

Turnitin is a comprehensive plagiarism prevention system that allows instructors to quickly and effectively check student writing submissions in a fraction of the time necessary to scan a few suspect papers using a search engine. Every paper submitted is returned in the form of a customized Originality Report. Results are based on exhaustive searches of billions of pages from both current and archived instances of the internet, millions of student papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals. Any matches uncovered between submitted papers and source material is detailed in an intuitive and unambiguous format.

Prevention vs. Detection

Using Turnitin's service acts as deterrent to electronic plagiarism when student know that their papers will be evaluated for originality. Assuring that students understand what constitutes plagiarism and how to properly cite references is critical to encouraging academic integrity.

If you plan to use Turnitin with your classes, please take advantage of the service's deterrent value by:

  • Letting your students know that their papers will be analyzed for plagiarism. You can indicate this on your syllabus or course page, in assignment handouts, or during class meetings.
  • Encouraging students to review Turnitin's plagiarism prevention online resources.

Getting started

Instructors can find information about using Turnitin with Canvas here.

Page last updated August 8, 2023.