How to Use Turnitin

imageHellooooo my lovely little kittens!

The other week, the illustrious Emma wrote a blog post about submitting assignments via Moodle, but left out any information regarding our good friend Turnitin. Apparently it’s not really used very often in “Da Business Skewl”, but I am here to tell you that it is often used elsewhere (that is to say, I know it is used in the School of Education and Arts where I am, and assume it is also used elsewhere).

So I figured a blog post on how to use Turnitin was in order!

Overview

Firstly, I guess I had best give you an overview, so that you actually know what I’m talking about. Turnitin is basically a text checking system. It is used by lecturers and tutors to check whether we (students) have referenced properly and haven’t just copied all of our information from Wikipedia. Because that would be bad. Don’t do that. Unless your assignment explicitly states: “Please copy and paste all your information from Wikipedia and just hand that in”, but I really cannot see that happening. And if it does, please tell me what course you are studying because I want in. Anyway, back to the point. Turnitin checks your assignment against all the other academic works it has in the system, and also against all of the other students’ work that has been uploaded from around the world. Which is a lot. I assume. I don’t actually have the statistics or anything.

What do I do if my percentage is super high?

Once you have submitted your assignment to Turnitin, the system will return to you what is called an ‘Originality Report’, which will give you a percentage of your work that it has determined to be similar to other works in its system. Don’t freak out if this number is quite high. This report will also highlight which areas of your work it suggests are similar, so you can go through your work and see which areas may be an issue.

Often you will find that things like the essay topic or your lecturer’s name will be highlighted. This is because other students in your course will have also submitted to Turnitin, and the same essay topic will be on their assignment too, meaning the system will have picked up that there is a similarity. This is absolutely fine and to be expected. Your lecturer or tutor should not mark you down for that because it’s not exactly something you can help, and it is not plagiarism. Turnitin occasionally also highlights some really ridiculous things as being similar to other things in its system. For example, it may highlight the word ‘the’, which is probably going to be in pretty much every single piece of work ever.

Don’t Stress!

The other thing that Turnitin will often highlight will be things such as quotes, and possibly sections that you have paraphrased. If it has highlighted direct quotes, you shouldn’t need to worry as long as you have referenced those quotations properly. Make sure you have both an in text citation (or footnotes, depending on which referencing style you are using) and a works cited/bibliography/reference list at the end of your work. If it has highlighted sections that you have paraphrased, then you need to double check that there are not sections that you should instead have quoted. If it has highlighted a word or two from your paraphrasing then it shouldn’t be an issue as long as you have referenced correctly, but if it highlighted a huge chunk of your writing then you might want to either include it as a direct quote, or rephrase it further so that it is in your own words. But make sure it is properly referenced either way!

How to actually use it

Okay, here’s the exciting stuff. How to actually use this service. There are two main ways to access Turnitin, and they only vary depending on whether a tutor or lecturer has set up a specific Turnitin point for you, or if you are just accessing it generally. This may sound confusing. DON’T FREAK OUT.

If a tutor or lecturer has asked you to submit via Turnitin, then they will generally say which of these options you should use in the course description. If not, don’t stress. You can easily check yourself. If you log in to the Moodle shell for that particular course, then the link for submitting your assignment should be a Turnitin link. If you click on the link and then click submit, it will come up with Turnitin across the top of the page. If not, your tutor or lecturer may intend for you to submit it to Turnitin by yourself.

To do so, all you need to do is go to your Moodle home page, then click the ‘Study Help’ drop down link. From there you should be able to select Turnitin. If you are submitting an assignment to Turnitin this way, you will need to enrol yourself. Just click ‘Enrol Me’. It’s as simple as that.

Now for the important stuff. MAKE SURE that you do not submit your work to this general Turnitin page if you have been asked to submit it through a link in your course Moodle. It will not be submitted to your tutor or lecturer, and when you try to submit it through the proper link later it will come back as 100% plagiarised, because you have basically plagiarised yourself! If your tutor or lecturer has not given you a specific Turnitin link in Moodle, be aware that just submitting it to general Turnitin will not submit it as an assignment, it will only check it for plagiarism.

That’s all folks!

Hopefully that has given you some more of an idea of what to expect when submitting via Turnitin. If you are still unsure or have any questions, you can either ask your tutor or lecturer, or you can come and visit us on the ASK desk between 10am­–2pm, Monday–Thursday. We are situated on the ground floor of the library in the Mount Helen campus and we don’t bite. I promise.

This blog post is already far too long, so I will let you get back to attempting to submit your assignments to Turnitin. Good luck!

 

– Tegan 🙂

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