What is TurnItIn, and how does it work? How do I view the TurnItIn report for my assignment?

Turnitin is the program that some instructors use to check for plagiarism. This program checks your submission for similarities to any material on the internet and to all other submissions turned into the program. It will then highlight any passages in your papers that seem similar to these other pages and create a report with links to the outside material. Most written assignments in this class will be run through the Turnitin program.

Please be aware that Turnitin is merely a starting point and that I will use my experience and judgment in interpreting the report. Your instructor can change the sensitivity of the program, so just looking at the percentage of highlighted material is often misleading. I set the program to highlight all quoted material and even small matches, so correctly documented quotations will appear highlighted in my reports. This allows me to easily check your source material. As long as you have correctly documented your source material, your grade will not suffer!

Also, I have found plagiarized material that Turnitin did not pick up, so if you're tempted to plagiarize, don't count on a clean Turnitin report to save you.

To see directions on viewing a Turnitin report, click here.