In order to use Turnitin, students must have a Turnitin account. Please contact your instructors regarding class enrollment information as this can only be provided by instructors. If you are a returning Turnitin student, see warning below before creating another account/profile.

First Option: Your Instructor adds students directly to the class in Turnitin and a welcome email is sent with your account information.

  1. Go to
  2. Log into your account in the upper right hand corner, using the information provided in the welcome email.
  3. Review your Profile and select a secret question. Remember, the answer is space sensitive.
  4. Your class will show on your account homepage.
  5. Click on the class name and you will see the assignments and submissions for that class.

Second Option: Your instructor provides a Class ID # and enrollment password to the class in order for you to create your own account to use Turnitin.

  1. Go to
  2. Under the email box in the upper right corner,click on the link “Create Account”.
  3. On the next window, where it says “Create a New Account” choose “Student” link.
  4. Follow the directions on the New User page. You must have a Class ID# and class enrollment password to complete your profile.(Do not cut and paste into these fields.)
  5. Once enrolled, your class will show on your homepage.
  6. Click on the class name and you will see the assignments and submissions for that class.

Once the initial student account with profile* is complete, you will only need to log into your account to see the class, or classes, in which you are enrolled. If you are enrolled in multiple Turnitin classes, you will need a class ID# and enrollment password for each class, in order to add the classes to your Turnitin account. Once you are enrolled in each class, you do not need that class ID and password again.

*The user Profile consists of an e-mail address, user password, optional personal information, and a set of user preferences.

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Paper Submission - Submitting a paper via file upload - Student

How to Submit a Paper via

Students can submit papers to assignments which have been created by the instructor.

To submit a paper using file upload, please do the following:

  1. Log into your account. (make sure to get account for your class period)
  2. Click on the title of the Class you wish to submit to.
  3. Click on the blue "Submit" button for the assignment you wish to submit to. If there is a grey "Submit" button, submissions are not allowed for this assignment. Please check the assignment start and due dates and the assignment info icon*.
  4. Choose Single File Upload.
  5. Enter your Title of your paper.
  6. Click on "browse" to locate the paper saved to your computer.
  7. Click on the file and click "open".
  8. Click the "upload" button at the bottom.
  9. STOP, and WAIT for the next page to appear.
  10. Click "submit" to confirm your submission.

Important, after your paper is successfully submitted, your digital receipt will be displayed on screen. The digital receipt has a paper ID, which is confirmation that Turnitin has received your submission. If you do not see a digital receipt with a paper ID, then your paper was not successfully received by Turnitin. The digital receipt is also emailed to you as well.

For a video on how to submit a paper, please go the web address:

Troubleshooting:
If you are unable to upload your paper, there could be a problem with the formatting of your paper. Please re-save your paper in a different file format.

*The "assignment info" button is located under the "info" column. Clicking on this icon will show you additional assignment information:

  • Additional assignment instructions
  • Whether late papers are allowed
  • Whether resubmissions are allowed

Please contact the instructor if you have any additional questions about the assignment.

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Paper Submissions - Error Uploading Paper – All

Please review the guide below to help resolve issues preventing you from uploading papers to Turnitin.com:

If you have a firewall and/or anti-virus (Ex.AVG) installed on your computer, then it may prevent Turnitin from working correctly. Note that sometimes, just using a different browser will resolve upload issues, so for example, if you are using Internet Explorer, try using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

To submit a paper to Turnitin, your paper must meet our requirements. Turnitin will currently accept the following file types:

  1. Microsoft Word® (.doc / .docx)*
  2. OpenOffice (.odt)**
  3. WordPerfect® (.wpd)
  4. PostScript (.ps/.eps)
  5. Adobe® PDF
  6. HTML
  7. Rich text format (.rtf)
  8. Plain text (.txt)

Your paper must contain a minimum of 25 words, must be under 20MB (or approximately two million characters), and must not contain spaces in between every letter (l i k e t h i s).

Please note that we do not support:

  1. Microsoft Works (.wps)
  2. Apple Pages file types
  3. Spreadsheets (ex. Excel files) or PowerPoint files
  4. PDF files of images, or PDF files which do not contain highlightable text (ex. a "scanned" file, which is often simply a picture of text, is unacceptable).

Therefore, if you are an unsupported word processor, you may need to save the file as a TXT or RTF file in order to upload to Turnitin.

*Note: We do not accept Microsoft Word 2007 macros-enabled (.docm) files (we do accept the standard .docx files). Whatever macro is encoded in the file is stripped away when submitted to Turnitin. For example, when using a "letter replacement macro," we strip the macro from the Wordfile, and whatever characters the student originally had in the file will appear (ex. "a~").

**Note: Turnitin will not accept .odt files created from Google Docs. Turnitin will not accept ".doc" files created using OpenOffice since OpenOffice ".doc" files are not 100% Microsoft Word equivalent.

Files uploaded to Turnitin must have correctly matching file extensions. For example, if you save a document as a Word file, it must have a Word extension(.DOC or .DOCX). Turnitin will automatically reject files with mis-matched extensions (Ex. Word file with an.RTF extension). If you are experiencing a file format issue, please re-open the file in a word processor, and save the file again using the "save as" function and choosing a different format from the file type pull down menu (try RTF or TXT as they are the most "safe").

As mentioned above, if you have a firewall enabled (such as those included with many Antivirus programs like McAfee, Norton, and AVG) it may prevent you from uploading a paper to Turnitin successfully. If this is the case, please add the following as a “safe site” (aka Trusted Site / WhiteList) to your firewall and/or browser:

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Originality Report - Processing time - Student
Instructors have the option of allowing students to view the Originality Report. If your instructor has enabled this option, then the Originality Report for your submitted file is usually created within 5 to 10 minutes of submission. That is for an average paper of 500 to 1000 words. Longer papers will take a little more time.
However, please note that Originality Reports for resubmitted assignments take 24-hours to regenerate. During this time, you will not have access to the Originality Report or the similarity index (percentage). If your instructor has not allowed students to view the Originality Report, you will need to contact your instructor regarding this matter.

Instructors have the option of allowing students to view the Originality Report. If your instructor has enabled this option, then the Originality Report for your submitted file is usually created within 5 to 10 minutes of submission. That is for an average paper of 500 to 1000 words. Longer papers will take a little more time.
However, please note that Originality Reports for resubmitted assignments take 24-hours to regenerate. During this time, you will not have access to the Originality Report or the similarity index (percentage). If your instructor has not allowed students to view the Originality Report, you will need to contact your instructor regarding this matter.

Originality Report - How to view - Student

Turnitin Originality Reports are available to students with the permission of their Instructor. To find out if your instructor will allow students to view their Originality Report, please speak with your instructor directly before you submit your paper.
After submitting your paper, if your instructor has permitted students to review the Originality report, you may access the report by following these steps:

  1. Sign into your account.
  2. Click on the title of your class
  3. Under the "Similarity" header, click on the percentage or the color coded box to view the Originality Report
  4. The Originality Report will open in a new window.

If the Icon is a grey box with dashes, please allow additional time for the report to be generated. Resubmitted papers can take 24 hours to generate a new Originality Report. If there is no color coded box, but there is text that reads "not available" then your instructor has *not allowed* students to view the Originality Report. You will need to speak with your instructor regarding any of these topics.

Originality Report - Interpreting the results - Student

Originality Reports provide a summary of the matching text found in a submitted paper. The percentage indicates the overall similarity index of the paper, based on how much matching text was found. The highlighted text in your document is color coded and numbered to match the sources on the right. Turnitin does not have a guide to what is a good or bad percentage. It all depends on the assignment type and what threshold the instructor has set. Research papers tend to have a higher percentage since there is more content from other sources. Please contact your instructor regarding the interpretation of your results (eg. what is "good" or "bad").
A breakdown of the indexes with the color codes are listed below:
0% (a valid result)--Blue icon
1-24%--Green icon 25-49%--Yellow icon 50-74%--Orange icon 75-100%--Red icon

Turnitin does not tell Instructors whether a paper has or has not been plagiarized. Originality Reports are simply tools to help instructors locate potential sources of plagiarism, or text which may have been incorrectly cited.

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Originality Report Result - 0% similarity score – Student

If you are receiving a 0% on your originality report, that means that none of the text in your paper is matching our database. To clarify, your paper is completely original (after the assignment filters have been implemented). You will also see the text "There are no matching sources for this report."
There are some filter options the instructor may be using that reduce the similarity score. They can exclude the bibliography, quoted materials and small matches. If you have any questions on these filter options please contact your instructor.

Originality Report - View website source matches found in Originality Report results (Tii2/DV) - Instructor

When documents are submitted to Turnitin, it is possible for matching text to be found between the submission and to online web pages or publications. If the web pages are still online, it may be possible to access the website we found the matching text to.
If you are interested in viewing the source text from "internet source" or "publication" matches found in the Originality Report, please follow the instructions below:

  1. Sign into your Turnitin account.
  2. Navigate to and open the Originality Report in question.
  3. On the right-hand side of the report you will see the "match overview" side panel which displays the "top" matches
  4. Hover over the "internet source" or "publication" match you want to view and click on the “right arrow” that appears (>).
  5. This will take you to the "match breakdown" view which shows you ALL matches (not just the top matches)
  6. Click on the internet or publication source you are interested in, and it will expand to show all matches from within that source that was found.
  7. Within the expanded list, hover over the exact URL or publication you wish to view, and click on the arrow that appears (pointing up and right).
  8. The source will open in a new window or tab.

Note: Turnitin has an ongoing database of the web which includes both current and archived internet sources. This means that we may have crawled a web page 3 years ago, saved it's text, and found a match to it TODAY. This is the case even if the web page no longer exists today.

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