Turnitin an originality checking and feedback software

Turnitin is used as part of MyCourses's Assignment activity or as an independent activity in MyCourses. Teachers supervising and/or advising thesis work can request a dedicated MyCourses workspace containing submission boxes for thesis drafts and for the final version. Send your request via the form on this page.

Students get immediate feedback on

• whether they have written about a research subject in their own words, and
• based on the similarities found, whether they have referenced their sources properly.

Teachers and thesis supervisors and advisors can

• use Turnitin to inspect detected similarities,
• comment on submitted text, and
• so also guide students to learn how to cite the work they refer to.

This is an excellent way to promote good writing ethics and uphold academic integrity, thus preventing plagiarism before it even arises.

Documents submitted to Turnitin are compared with texts stored in an extensive database or repository comprising books, journals, magazines, and other works from all major publishing houses, documents openly available on the internet, and academic reports and theses from most well-known universities. In its similarity report, visible to both the teacher as well as the student, Turnitin gives an overall percentage of similar text, highlights similar text in the submission and links it to the source for easy inspection. The report from the AI tool highlights and gives the percentage of the text estimated to be generated by artificial intelligence.

You can use a workspace in MyCourses called Independent Turnitin Originality Check for academic year 20xx-20yy. You can check text there independently of any courses. Alternatively, if you have a dedicated MyCourses workspace for instructing thesis work, you can use the Turnitin submission boxes for drafts to check your own work.

Unfortunately, there is no absolute percentage or number indicating a satisfactory result. The submitted text must always be reviewed and assessed regardless of the percentage of similarity given in the similarity report. Nonetheless, the less similar text there is, the better.

We recommend that you use Turnitin as often as possible. It can serve as a learning and feedback tool, not merely as an originality-checking tool.

As part of the student’s thesis writing process, the use of Turnitin is mandatory. As an instructor or a supervisor, you can use a personal, dedicated MyCourses workspace to advise or supervise theses. Order the personal workspace by filling in the form on this page. 

More info: Thesis supervision workspace in MyCourses - Turnitin - MyCourses help

The tool is automatically in use in all Turnitin submission boxes, and all new submissions are subjected to analysis. You are not able to control the tool in any way. There are restrictions that limit the use of this tool:

• the text length should be between 300 and 30000 words, 
• the file size must be less than 100 MB, 
• the text is in English, and 
• the accepted file types are .docx, .pdf, .txt, .rtf.

See Turnitin's FAQ for more information on the subject.

Although Turnitin claims high accuracy in detecting AI-generated text, experience gained so far shows this is not entirely so. Text generated by newer generative text models often slip through undetected. Also, the detector flags text corrected by grammar-correcting software, which, after all, use large language models and so is, in fact, AI-generated. Although the AI detector is far from perfect, it serves as a useful tool to help identify AI-generated text and its report serves as a basis for dialog with the student when misconduct may be suspected.

For more information, see Turnitin's FAQ on the subject.

When suspecting plagiarism, contact the Head of Academic Affairs (Learning Services) in your school. They can discuss your concerns with you and investigate the suspected plagiarism further if needed.

See here the process in more detail.