Use Turnitin¶

When you create an assignment (or editing an existing assignment) for students to submit their work in the Isidore Assignments tool you can easily enable a TurnItIn Plagiarism check on all submissions by students.

The best part about using TurnItIn through Isidore is that neither you nor your students need to setup or maintain an account with TurnItIn. Isidore does all of the communication with TurnItIn for you. If you’ve used TurnItIn before you no longer need to visit their website to create sites or have assignments checked.

Enabling Turnitin in Isidore's Assignments tool¶

Navigate to the Assignments tool in your Isidore course site.
Click on Add.
Fill in the assignment title and instructions.
If you would like students to acknowledge the honor pledge before submitting their work, check the box next to "Add honor pledge".
If you would like to add attachments to the assignment that contains instructions or a template to complete the assignment, click on the Add Attachments button, browse to where the files are located, and upload the files.
Set the open date, due date, and accept until date by clicking on the calendar and selecting a date. Once a date is selected, adjust the time by either using the slider or the minus and plus icons. The open date is when students will be able to see the assignment and begin submitting it. The accept until date is a date that students won't see, but allows them to submit their assignments late. Assignments submitted after the due date will be flagged as late.
Set advanced date options, such as hiding the due date from students (not recommended), adding the due date to the calendar (only shown if the Calendar tool is installed), and/or adding an announcement about the open date to announcements (only shown if the Announcements tool is installed). If you enable the announcements option, you'll be able to choose whether to send an email notification about the open date to all participants.
In the "Assign To" section, the settings allow you to select different options, such as individual assignments or group assignments.
- Assigning an assignment to each individual member of the site is the most frequently used option. This means that each student will submit their own assignment.
- Assigning an assignment to each individual member of the selected group(s) is used if you only want to assign an assignment to a specific group or section of students. Each student in the group or section will submit their own assignment.
- Assigning an assignment to the selected group(s), as a group assignment (one group member submits on behalf of the entire group) means that students are working in teams and only one student within that team will submit an assignment on behalf of the group.
Submission type refers to the format of the student's submitted assignment.
- Attachments only is the most common type, where students can upload file attachment(s) for the instructor to review. Students may upload up to 5 file attachments per assignment.
- Inline means that students type or paste their assignment into a text box for the instructor to review.
- Inline and Attachments means that students can choose whether to upload a file attachment or type or paste their assignment into a text box.
- Non-electronic is used to provide assignment instructions, but students aren't expected to submit anything electronically. One use case might be bringing an article to class. Single file upload works just like the attachments type, but restricts the number of files students can upload to one.
If you would like students to be able to resubmit their assignment prior to the due date, you can enable the "Allow Resubmission" option. Once enabled, enter the number of resubmissions students are allowed to have and when those resubmissions should be due (usually the due date or before).
Enable Turnitin by clicking on the Use Turnitin option. By default, students are allowed to see their originality reports (recommended), but you can uncheck that option.
If you would like to grade anonymously, you can check the box next to "Hide submitters' identities (e.g. for anonymous grading)". When grading, students' names will be replaced with an alphanumeric code. This setting can be toggled back on at any time. Please note that if students include their name within their file attachment or the filename, you'll be able to see their identities.
The default setting is that assignments are set to be graded, but this can be turned off my unchecking the "Grade this assignment" box.
- If you're setting up a graded assignment, select a grading scale. Please note that "Points" is the only grading scale that works with Gradebook.
- Specify the maximum number of points.
- Enable rubric grading if you wish to use a rubric. For more assistance with rubric grading, please visit the Rubrics page for step-by-step instructions.
- If you would like the assignment grades to be sent to the Gradebook, check the box to enable the setting. This setting only appears if you have the Gradebook tool installed.
- If you would like to setup peer review, check the box next to "Use peer assessment" and adjust the other settings. Please note that the start date for the peer review period is set to the assignment's accept until date.
Notification email options and additional information sections are expandable if you would like to adjust the notification settings and add items like a model answer.
Click on Post to save your assignment settings and make the assignment available to students at the specified open date and time.

Reviewing Student TurnItIn Originality Reports¶

Once an assignment has been submitted it will be sent to TurnItIn to be checked for plagiarism. An assignment can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 24 hours to be reviewed in TurnItIn and returned to the Isidore Assignments tool in your site.

To review the reports you can click on the Grade link under the Assignment title.
You’ll see that a report is ready for your review when there’s a flag icon under the TurnItIn column. Click on the flag icon next to the paper to open the Originality Report on TurnItIn’s website.

The color of the report icon indicates the similarity score of the paper, based on the amount of matching or similar text that was uncovered. The percentage range is 0% to 100%. The possible similarity ranges are:

Blue: No matching text
Green: One word to 24% matching text
Yellow: 25-49% matching text
Orange: 50-74% matching text
Red: 75-100% matching text

Please note that students' submitted documents must be more than 20 words for Turnitin to accept for review.

Please note that originality reports take at least 24 hours to be viewable for resubmission assignments.

View Instructor Guide for Interpreting Similarity Reports (PDF)

View Turnitin's online help for Interpreting Similarity Reports

Student View¶

If you’ve allowed students to review their Originality Reports they will see a similar icon on the page where they submitted their work. They can click on the flag icon to view their report on TurnItIn’s website.

Note: If you didn’t allow students to review their Originality reports when you created the assignment you can go back in, edit the assignment, and turn on that option for after the reports have been created and you’ve reviewed them.

How Turnitin Works¶

It’s important to review each Originality Report carefully – just because the similarity index number is high doesn’t necessarily mean the paper has been plagiarized. It’s up to you as the instructor to review the report and determine whether plagiarism has actually occurred. TurnItIn will simply find matches of groups of text and show those to you. It could very well be that student simply hasn’t cited text properly which makes it appear as copied.

TurnItIn looks for text matches of 7 words or more in three separate areas:

Previously submitted papers to TurnItIn
Current and archived sites on the Internet
Collection of periodicals and journals – some but not all

Please note that originality reports take at least 24 hours to be viewable for resubmission assignments.