Turnitin is a product in Canvas that provides a similarity report to students and faculty that fosters academic integrity while discouraging plagiarism at Liberty University. This product helps students and faculty by detecting unoriginal content in students’ assignments. Since Turnitin is available in Canvas, almost all Canvas assignments require Turnitin to provide a similarity report to students and faculty.

A similarity report from Turnitin can be accessed in two ways:

  1. The assignment settings can enable Turnitin to run originality detection on the submitted assignments. This provides a similarity report directly to students and faculty in Canvas.
  2. Faculty may upload assignments, discussion threads, discussion replies, and essay or short answer quiz responses to Turnitin. This provides a similarity report directly to the faculty.

Turnitin utilizes the following databases for the similarity report:

  • Internet archive: Turnitin’s web crawler has found and indexed more than 91 billion web pages that are likely to be used by students and researchers in their writing. This includes websites advertising previously submitted student work.
  • Global student papers database that contains more than 1.8 billion student papers that were submitted all around the world. This includes all Liberty students’ papers submitted to SafeAssign in Blackboard and Turnitin in Canvas.
  • Premium scholarly publications containing approximately 89.4 million subscription articles, 56,000 subscription journals, and more than 1,300 publishers.

Similarity Reports provide a summary of matching or highly similar text found in a submitted assignment. When a Similarity Report is available for viewing, a score percentage is provided along with a detailed report. If Turnitin has not finished generating a similarity report, a grayed-out icon is viewable in the Similarity column. This will be replaced with a percentage and detailed report once Turnitin is finished.

Information provided by Turnitin.

Resources

Do you need help accessing and interpreting the Turnitin similarity reports? Check out the following resources: