Turnitin Assignments – Overview and Context

Turnitin provides support for online submission, marking and plagiarism monitoring for any text-based submission.  Essays, reports, and written work can be submitted to Turnitin assignments giving the tutor control over features such as similarity scores and feedback studio for efficient marking tools.

Turnitin should only be used for text-based assignments (documents/essays/etc.).  Images may be included within documents submitted to Turnitin, but for assignments that are audio or video-based; either Blackboard assignments, Panopto assignments, or Large file submissions are available.

Features of Turnitin

Turnitin is primarily featured for its originality detection tools and the Feedback Studio marking tools.

Originality and Similarity Reports

For tutors, the Similarity Report becomes a useful indicator, flagging areas for investigation in a student’s work.  It is important to remember that a high similarity score is merely an indicator and not evidence of plagiarism, your professional interpretation as a tutor is required to reveal the full picture.  Areas of high similarity to published sources may have been appropriately referenced for example.  Areas of high similarity to another student’s work may simply be template/pro-forma elements, or alternatively could indicate potential collusion.

By using the settings ‘Allow students to see Similarity Reports’, and ‘Show Similarity Reports immediately (can overwrite reports until due date)’; this tool becomes a learning opportunity for students to improve their work and avoid issues of plagiarism.

Feedback Studio

The Feedback Studio provides marking tools to facilitate grading and providing in-text and audio feedback comments.  You can utilise ‘Quick Marks’ as a set of frequently used comments to speed up your feedback.  You can provide comments in the text, aligned to a marking rubric as well as providing overall feedback comments.  Feedback Studio also allows you to add up to 3 minutes of audio feedback for each student, offering highly personalised feedback.