Turnitin is one of the assessment submission and feedback tools used at USW. This page provides an overview of the system and subpages contain step-by-step guides to setting up, accessing, interpreting and marking a Turnitin assignment.
Turnitin is a tool used to help detect and discourage plagiarism and to encourage good referencing skills. It is a text comparison system – the text of any assignment submitted through Turnitin is compared to their huge databases of sources which includes things like online journals, newspapers, websites, and ebooks, as well as the work submitted by students from all over the world. It then creates an Originality Report which highlights any text matching one of those sources and gives this as percentage match. The report can then be viewed by staff as a quickly and easily to determine if the source has been used in an appropriate way.
You can choose to view both the Originality Report and the grading tools or one at a time, to start marking the assignment online. The grading tools allow you to write comments, highlight, and annotate an assignment just as you would do with a paper submission. You’ll also be able give an overall feedback comment, allocate marks, and to set up a pool of frequently used comments to save time.
Please note: In line with the University’s policy that assessment should be used to enhance learning, we recommend that Turnitin is always used in a manner which helps students to learn and develop their referencing and academic writing skills. For more information please read the Assessment For Learning Policy.
Turnitin can only be used to create online assignment submission for individual text-based files (up to 40 MB) in the following file formats:
If you are setting up an assignment which uses different types of files (multiple file submission, code, images, videos, etc) it is advised that you use the Blackboard Assignment tool instead.
For a full list of system requirements, including security settings details, please refer to the following Turnitin System Requirements page
You can find a full range of support information and advice on the use of Turnitin for students on our Student IT, Media and Technical Services Channel.