Turnitin Support

You may be asked to submit your work to Turnitin via Moodle or the Turnitin website. Here are instructions for Turnitin in Moodle.

The first time you submit a Turnitin assignment you will be sent an email advising of your Turnitin account creation, you should not be required to use this account.

This following video provides step-by-step instructions on accessing your mark and feedback for assignments submitted via Turnitin.

Click here to view the transcript of this video.

Created by: Mike Bogle, UNSW Arts & Social Sciences.

The following restrictions apply to Turnitin submissions:

• All submissions must be text-based. Scanned documents must be passed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software prior to submission.
• Turnitin accepts electronic files in the following formats. No other file types are accepted:
  • MS Word (.doc/.docx)
  • WordPerfect (.wpd)
  • Rich Text (.rtf)
  • Portable Document Format (.pdf)
  • PostScript (.eps), HTML (.htm), and
  • plain text (.txt) format.

• You can cut and paste files from other word processing programs into the Turnitin submit paper page.
• Only one file per student can exist for each assignment.
• The file size limit for text files is 20MB.

As soon as you submit your assignment, Turnitin will display a digital receipt on the screen—if it doesn't, your assignment has not been successfully submitted. Turnitin will also email you a submission receipt.

Other settings may apply

Assignment settings determine whether you can:

• make multiple submissions during a specified period, or only one submission
• receive, if multiple submissions are possible, an originality report every time you submit, or only once
• view the originality reports generated when OriginalityCheck checks your assignment against its databases.

Individual course conveners or your School policy determine these settings. If you have any questions about how OriginalityCheck is being used in your course, ask your course convener.

An Originality Report will be generated within 10 minutes of an initial submission to an assignment. A report for a re-submission to an assignment can take up to 24 hours to generate.

While an Originality Report is being generated, in the Turnitin assignment's page the relevant icon in the Originality Report column will display greyed out. It will remain greyed out if your instructor has decided not to allow students to view the reports.

24-hour reporting delay on re-submitted assignments

Your instructor may set up the assignment so that you can amend and then re-submit it based on your Turnitin report or other feedback. Be aware that you will not be able to see your new originality report until 24 hours after you submitted your first draft.

Put your revised draft through OriginalityCheck at least 24 hours before the coursework deadline if you want to see an originality report before you submit your final version, or if you're required to submit an originality report with your assignment.

Citations and references

Turnitin picks up even correctly cited quotations and bibliography items and reports them as matched with other documents in the Turnitin database. This is because:

• the journals, articles and texts you quoted or referred to may be in the database, and/or
• assignments submitted by other students may have quoted from, or cited, the same reference works as you did.

These parts of your assignment will generate match percentages, which increases your assignment's overall similarity rating.

Don't be alarmed by this. Your teachers don't just accept the percentage Turnitin gives to an assignment. They check the reports and interpret the results.

Filter them out

If you want to, you can ask OriginalityCheck to ignore quotations, references and bibliography items in your assignment when reporting on its originality. You can find the instructions for doing so on this Turnitin support page (scroll down to Excluding Quoted or Bibliographic Material).

You'll have to switch the filter on every time you run a report—you can't set it to stay on and be applied automatically to each assignment.

Even with the filter turned on, Turnitin will still find some matches. When your teachers review the originality report, they will see that the matches are only for legitimate quotations and references.

Sample Originality Report

The following graphic shows an annotated sample Originality Report that Turnitin generates from a submission.

	Similarity Index: This shows how much of the submission matches existing catalogued sources.
	Matching Sections: Highlighted section of the submission indicate that there are matching sources in the Turnitin database. Clicking on a matching section shows the existing source in a pop-up view.
	Match Overview: This shows all matches in the submission. Click on a match in the overview to jump to the corresponding section of the submission.
	Filter Settings: Click the filter button to show the filter settings window, which allows you to change similarity estimate options. Exclude Quotes: Enabling this setting excludes all material in quotations from the similarity report. Exclude Bibliography: Enabling this setting excludes the bibliography from the similarity report. Exclude Matches Under Amount: Enabling this setting allows you to set a criteria (in words or percentage) for matches to be included in the similarity report

How Are My Submissions Stored?

Student papers submitted to Turnitin remain for an undisclosed period of time. Turnitin stores your document in both original form, and an “electronic fingerprint” form:

• Only you and your lecturer can see the original form
• The electronic fingerprint is used to check other Turnitin submissions against your document.

Are My Submissions Secure?

Neither UNSW nor Turnitin administration staff can see your submitted assignments. It is recommended that you do not identify yourself in any assignments submitted using Turnitin, except through your student ID number.

What Happens If An Assignment Matches Mine?

If another document subsequently submitted to Turnitin matches text in one of your assignments, the lecturer responsible for the new document is provided with the following information:

• Name of the institution where the matching assignment originated
• Course name for the matching assignment
• Name and email address of the lecturer responsible for that course
• File name of the matching assignment
• Date that the matching assignment was submitted

The new lecturer can then contact your lecturer, and request a copy of your assignment. UNSW lectures are advised not to disclose authorship details to any person who makes this request.

There are a number of reasons why you may be unable to submit an assignment to your course's Turnitin Submission box, each with a recommended course of action.