Description: The following passage mainly focuses on turnitin login, which will show you how to read and interpret the originality report created by Turnitin for uploaded assignments. It also shows you how the plagiarism shows up in the originality report.
Welcome to UOIT teaching and learning centre’s teachtorial on reading the originality report in Turnitin, this is one of a series of tutorials designed to help you use Turnitin by reviewing the originality report for matched text entries and how to interpret the results.
Let’s get started. I’m going to log in to turnitin.com with my email address and password. I’m taken to the instructor homepage where I see a list of all my classes, the class that I’m looking at today is ABCD Class 1. I click on the class to go into the class home page.
The link that you’re going to click on now is the view link, this takes you to the next page which is called the assignment inbox, this is where you will find all of the assignments that your students have uploaded, we’ve uploaded two assignments, one is chemical reactions and the other is Freud and Skinner.
You can have a look at their papers by simply clicking on the title of the paper which opens up the document viewer, you can see the paper as it is without being marked up with any of the text that is similar to other sources, over to the right hand side under report is what’s called the similarity index.
This percentage tells you how much of the report or how much of the paper has been plagiarized according to Turnitin, keep in mind that Turnitin does not detect plagiarism but rather it detects text that is similar to another source in its repository.
We’ll have a look at the report in one minute, to help you understand the different colors and the percentages Turnitin considers the following when it looks at the similarity index, anything from 1 to 24% will be highlighted in green, anything from 25 to 49 percent will be highlighted in yellow, anything from 50 to 74 percent such as these are highlighted in orange, anything above 74 percent will be highlighted in red.
It gives you a vague idea of how Turnitin determines the similarity index and its relation to how much of the paper may be plagiarized, I’m going to have a look at the chemical reactions paper, click on the percentage, that takes me to the originality report.
You’re offered a window before you get to the actual report to give you a tutorial or a four-minute walk-through of the originality report, it’s highly recommended to watch this, here is what you’ve been waiting for, it is the originality report.
On the left-hand side of the screen you see the paper itself with highlighted areas that are the areas that Turnitin considers to have been plagiarized, on the right hand side are the sources that matched to those entries on the left-hand side.
If we look at this paper, the first paragraph looks fine, the second paragraph, third paragraph and most of the fourth paragraph have all been linked to source number one which is over on the right-hand side called www.gotessay.com.
You can see that 55% of this paper is matching to this website, on the right-hand side you can get more details about the website that the internet source or the publication or a student paper is matched to by clicking on the little arrow to the right of the percentage.
It shows you a list of other places where it has found similarities, this shows you that a certain number of different areas have taken work from gotessays.com, on the left-hand side it has expanded the text from the Internet source itself so that you can compare it to the text in the paper.
Here it says later in the 17th century, a German chemist named, over here it says later in the 17th century German chemist named, this means that your student has copied this directly from this source, I can go back to see the other matches by clicking the arrow to the left of match breakdown.
If I want to see the second match which is okcupid.com, I double click on it, over on the left hand side the paper opens up to the area where that text is similar, in this particular case you notice that not all of the text has been copied, somebody may have done a half-decent job of paraphrasing as opposed to stealing the text from someone else in which case we would be looking at plagiarism.
On the right hand side this particular internet source has been at 12% used in this paper, let’s have a look at a publication, 1% of the paper has come from this publication, I can click on the arrow to go to that particular publication and see it showing up here.
This is not an example of plagiarism, this is why it takes a human eye to look at these originality reports as opposed to the percentages, this is not high percentage, it’s at 1%, but if that was a higher percentage, you could say that maybe it’s not all the way up to 71% similarity index, you take into account that some of the similarities are perfectly acceptable.
That’s one of the reports, let’s have a look at the second report, the Freud and Skinner, I’m going over to where the similarity index is shown, I’m going to click on the index to have the paper, its matches show up, on the left hand side is the paper, on the right hand side of are the sources.
You could tell from this paper that this particular student has gone to an Internet source called echeat.com and has captured a lot of information, on the left hand side if I scroll through the paper, I can look at all the different ones, I can see that that was a huge source of information for this student.
But there are other sources here including student papers, when you click on the arrow for student papers, you get a message, this was submitted to Westminster College, your message says because submitted papers remain the intellectual property of their authors, instructors and respective institutions, we are unable to show you the content of this paper at this time.
If you would still like to view this paper, please click on the link above to submit a permission request to the author’s instructor, in other words if you click on this link, you will be given an opportunity to submit an email to the students instructor from this particular paper.
Let’s go back to the match breakdown, there are two other papers that are similar, if I double click over here, I am taken to the area that is similar over on the left, your eye tells you that’s not a huge problem, the rest of the paper is a huge problem.
But this is not a huge problem, so I’m not too worried about number six, number five is taken from a reference, I don’t see any other fives throughout the paper, five and six aren’t a problem to me, number four is 2%, this is simply the use of the two names.
I see number four showing up but I don’t see that as a problem either, the one that is maybe becoming a concern to you is the echeat.com, these are fictitious papers that have been created by the teaching and learning Department to show you how the plagiarism shows up in the originality report, this concludes our teachtorial on reading the originality report in Turnitin, thank you for reading.