Viewing Turnitin Originality Reports

You can view the reports through the ‘Turnitin Assignments' link under the ‘Course Tools' area of the ‘Control Panel', or through the ‘Grade Centre' (provided anonymous marking is not set) by clicking on the assignment and going to Open Attempt then View beside 'Originality Report'. This Guide focuses on the ‘Turnitin Assignments' link.

Note: If you have set up groups, e.g. Tutorial Groups, you can see the reports in subsets using the ‘Turnitin Assignments by Group' tool.

View Report though Turnitin Assignments

Click Turnitin Assignments under 'Course Tools' in the 'Control Panel'.
You will be presented with a list of all your Turnitin assignments for this course.
Click the title of the assignment you want to view.
You will see a screensimilar tothe one below showing all the students in the course.

Note: If you do not see a student or if your class changes regularly, click RosterSync. This will refresh the Turnitin student data to reflect any new students added to the course since the assignment was created.

Students who have submitted an assignment will have a report under the 3rd column, (Similarity) with an indicator to tell you the percentage of matched text found in the database.

100% would indicate that therewas an identical document or documents containing 100% of the text of the assignment in the database.

24% would indicate that there is approximately one quarter of the submitted text that matches text in the database.

The majority of well researched and cited essays will be somewhere in the middle. There are no hard and fast rules to connect a certain percentage with plagiarism.

Detailed view of individual report

To see a more detailed individual report, click the report icon (with the coloured square) next to the student in question.

You will the see a breakdown of any copied text. It is colour coded and numbered to show you which text matches which sources in the database. If you find Durham sources, this may indicate collusion.

Click any link on the right hand side to go to the sources that match your student's submission.

Note: If the match is to an essay on another course or at another institution, you will be asked to supply your email address. You can then email the instructors associated with the matching essay to request to see the results. This step is a necessary feature of the software complying with data protection laws.

If you have chosen to exclude quoted material you may see a pop up box appear.

This is a warning about the percentage of the paper which constitutes quoted material.

Click on the icon at thebottom left of the screen to produce information which shows the paper ID, when the assignment was submitted, the word count, the character count and the number of times the paper has been submitted as well as details about the sources of the matches and the number of GradeMark comments and QuickMarks.

Viewing All Sources

A more detailed view of the matches can be obtained by clicking on the All Sources button at the top right of the screen. This will bring up a list of all the matches including those hidden by larger matches.

Click on any match to see just those matches in the submission.

You can move through the matches to view the corresponding section from the matching source in a pop up window eitherby clicking on each piece of text as shown below

or by using the arrow keys below All Sources (outlines in red in the image below).

Click the webpage URL within the pop up to open that site in a new browser window.

Click Expand to Full Text at the right of the pop up to see the text of the webpage.

Click the ‘X’ to close the pop up box.

Viewing Student papers

Papers submitted to other institutions

If there is a match to a paper submitted to another institution you will see a box giving the name of the institution the match was submitted to but you will not be able to see the paper because it remains the intellectual property of the authors, instructors and institution.

You can send a request to that institution to ask for permission to view that paper by clicking on the words “Submitted to institution”. This will open a box for your email address as shown below.

Granting permission is entirely at the discretion of the instructors in the other institution and may not be granted. Unfortunately there is no mechanism to feedback this information to the instructor making the request.

Papers submitted to Durham University

You can only view papers from other students in the same institution if you are an instructor on the course the paper was submitted to. This might occur in cases of collusion. If you are not an instructor you must request permission to view the paper as if it was from another institution.

To view details of the matching submission change to all sources view by clicking on the All Sources button at the top right of the screen.

Select the match you want to view and click on ‘Submitted to University of Durham’.

This will bring up the matching paper in a new window.

This will show the title and author, the submission date and time and the paper ID.

Moving through submissions

You can move through the submissions using the arrows at the top right of the screen.

To move straight to a particular student click the downward arrow to the right of ‘Paper x of xx’ and click the student name.

What to do if the same document is uploaded twice

If by accident the same document is uploaded twice (for instance, by an administrator and by an academic) you can still get to the original report.

Exclude certain matches

Open the originality report. Click on the All Sources button at the top right of the screen.

This will bring up a list of all the matches including those hidden by larger matches. Click‘Select Sources to be Excluded’ to bring up checkboxes.

Click the boxes beside matches you want to exclude and click the Exclude button at the bottom of the column. (The number of items to be excluded will be shown in brackets. The originality score is automatically recalculated.

Restore exclude matches

To restore exclude matches click on the view/edit sources button at the bottom of the screen.

This will bring up a list of the excluded matches and you can tick the ones you want back and then click Restore Selected. Once again the similarity report will be automatically recalculated.

Document origin: Learning Technologies Team1