Turnitin - Plagiarism Review

Overview

Turnitin is a tool that can be enabled on Canvas assignments to check student submissions for plagiarism. Submissions are compared to a large database of sources for similarities. A report is then generated for instructors to review any matches and associated sources.

Enable Turnitin

To use Turnitin on an assignment:

  1. Create an assignment in your Canvas course.
  2. On the assignment options page, scroll down to the Plagiarism Review section and select Turnitin from the drop down menu.
    The plagiarism review drop down menu with "Turnitin" selected.
  3. You will then see several options to customize the reporting.
    • Compare submissions against - Select the sources you want Turnitin to check.
    • Similarity Report - Choose to exclude things like bibliographies
    • Show report to students - Choose when or if students will be allowed to view the similarity report.
  4. Confirm the remainder of your assignment settings.
  5. Click Save.

Review Turnitin Report

To review the Turnitin reports for student submissions, go to the Grades menu of your course. The first thing you will notice is that each student that has made a submission will have a color-coded icon in their cell of the gradebook for that assignment. The color represents how much of the student's submission matched other sources so you can prioritize which students you need to review.
A view of a Canvas gradebook showing the Turnitin color indicators in 2 students' cells for a grade column. One is read indicating a high match to other text. The other is green indicating little to no matching text.   The Turnitin Color Key scale indicating the Similarity thresholds for each color. 0% is blue, 6% is green, 43% is yellow, 58% is orange, 80% is red.

To view the full report:

  1. Click in the student's cell that you want to review.
  2. Select the options button that appears to the right of the points possible.
    A cell in a Canvas gradebook indicating the button to click in order to get the menu with additional grade options.
  3. Choose Speedgrader from the menu that appears on the right side of the page.
    The menu indicating the location of the SpeedGrader link.
  4. Near the top right, you will see a percentage next to the name of the file the student submitted. Click on the percent value.
    An example of what instructors see in the Speedgrader for a Turnitin assignment. The image shows the file name and the Similarity score from Turnitin.
  5. The similarity report will then be displayed with all matching content highlighted based on the source. Matching sources will be listed on the right side of the page.

Similarity Report Guides

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