About Turnitin

Turnitin does not check for plagiarism. What it actually does is compare your submissions against their database and highlight wherever your writing is similar to one of their sources. The database includes billions of web pages: both current and archived content from the internet, a repository of works other students have been submitted to Turnitin in the past, and a collection of documents, which comprises thousands of periodicals, journals, and publications.

Turnitin provides your Teachers with a Similarity Report giving a summary of details, including the sources matched to your submission, to use as a tool to determine if the matches are acceptable. A similarity score is shown on the Report as a score percentage with links to sources of text matching.

Sometimes Departments allow students to run a formative assignment through Turnitin which creates a Similarity Report that they can view and can get feedback on any issues that need addressing.

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