Succeed Training About the TurnitinUK service TurnitinUK is a UK-based service which allows educational institutions to carry out electronic comparisons of submitted work against other electronic sources. These sources include databases of electronic journals, the internet and other students work. In other words, this is an electronic plagiarism detection service. It is also being used to raise student awareness of the issue by notifying students that staff have tools at their disposal to check submitted work for plagiarism. Students are less likely to plagiarise if they know it is highly likely they will be caught doing so. Uses of TurnitinUK at the University of Stirling Student involvement with TurnitinUK at the University of Stirling will be in one of two ways, both of which are reached through Succeed. Either: 1) Your tutor will ask or advise you to submit your work to the TurnitinUK service to check it for any potential plagiarism issues. Then, after checking your assignment via TurnitinUK you will go on to make your final assignment submission through the Assignments Tool in Succeed. or 2) Your tutor will ask you to make your actual, final assignment submission through TurnitinUK. In both cases the assignment settings in TurnitinUK may vary, but broadly speaking you are likely to find that you will be able to submit drafts of your assignment work to TurnitinUK multiple times in the run up to making the final submission. This will not be true for all assignments, however, and so it is strongly recommended that you check with your module tutor on the arrangements for each assignment. Uploading and submitting an assignment through TurnitinUK To upload and submit an electronic assignment using the TurnitinUK online service through Succeed, follow these steps: 1. Login to Succeed via the Portal. 2. On your My Succeed page, click the relevant module title in your My Courses list to access the module. 3. Locate the assignment. This is likely to be accessed from the Turnitin Submissions link on the Course Menu. If your module does not have this link, please contact your module coordinator. 4. Click on the text View/Complete underneath the assignment title. Figure 1 shows an example of the link to an assignment in Succeed. Page 1 of 7
Figure 1 - Example of a link to an assignment 5. After a few moments, the Assignment Inbox displays (Figure 2). Figure 2 - The Assignment Inbox & Portfolio area 6. To see the details of the assignment, hoover over the Info icon. Details of the assignment are visible in the black box (Figure 3). Figure 3 - The Assignment Details 7. To upload your completed essay to TurnitinUK, click the blue Submit button. 8. The submit paper: by file upload page is displayed (Figure 4). Page 2 of 7
Figure 4 - The Submit Paper by Single File Upload page 9. Leave the paper submission method as single file upload. TurnitinUK brings in your first and last name details, leave these in place as they stand. 10. In the submission title field type the title of your assignment submission. 11. Choose the file you want to upload to Turnitin, click the Choose from this computer button. You can also upload a file from Dropbox or Google Drive (depending on where you have saved your file). 12. A File Upload dialogue box opens. Navigate to find the file to be uploaded. Only one file may be uploaded at a time through TurnitinUK, no larger than 20 MB in size. TurnitinUK currently only accepts documents in the following file types: - Microsoft Word - WordPerfect - PostScript - PDF - HTML (web pages) - RTF (Rich Text format) - Plain Text. 13. Select the file and click Open. 14. Click upload. Please note your assignment is not yet submitted to TurnitinUK, you must complete the steps outlined below. Page 3 of 7
15. TurnitinUK moves to the second step of the submission process, as shown in Figure 5. The contents of the file to be uploaded are displayed in a text field on screen. Ignore any losses in formatting here, TurnitinUK is interested in the text used, not its layout. Figure 5 - Step 2 of the TurnitinUK Submission process 16. To cancel the submission at the point click the Cancel button. 17. Otherwise click Confirm to submit. Please be patient here and wait for a short while as your submission is uploaded to TurnitinUK. 18. Once the process is completed you should see a message on screen to confirm the successful submission of your assignment (Figure 6). Figure 6 - Confirmation of a successful submission Originality Reports Originality Reports provide a summary of the matching text found in a submitted paper. TurnitinUK uses a colour-coded scale to represent the amounted of perceived or potential plagiarism in a submission. This scale is shown in Figure 7. Page 4 of 7
Figure 7 - Similarity Indices The colour of the report icon indicates the overall similarity index of the paper, based on how much matching text TurnitinUK found. The possible similarity indices are: blue (no matching text) green (1 word - 24% matching text) yellow (25-49% matching text) orange (50-74% matching text) red (75-100% matching text) A ghosted report (i.e. one that does not appear to have a similarity index associated with it) indicates that the report is not yet ready. Please Note - These indices do not reflect TurnitinUK s assessment of whether a paper has or has not definitely been plagiarised. Originality Reports are simply tools to help you identify where sources contain text similar to that in your submitted papers. The decision to deem any work as having been plagiarised will be made carefully by academic staff after careful examination of both the submitted paper and the suspect sources. Accessing an Originality Report To access your Originality Report follow these steps: 1. Navigate to the TurnitinUK assignment in Succeed and click View/Complete. The Class Homepage is displayed (Figure 8). Figure 8 The Class Homepage Page 5 of 7
2. To open the Originality Report associated with your submission, click the icon showing a percentage score and the colour coding associated with this submission. An example of this is shown in Figure 9. Figure 9 - An example colour coding of a submission 3. The Originality Report displays in a new browser window (Figure 10). Figure 10 - An example Originality Report 4. The Originality Report has three main sections: Report header - The report header shows information about the submitted paper including paper title, author, similarity index, and the date the report was processed. The actual text of the paper - The left side of the report shows the text of the submitted paper. Matching text is highlighted and numbered to correspond with sources to the right. Any matching sources - The right side of the report lists the sources of matching text (again highlighted and numbered to correspond with similarity indices). 5. The Originality Report for your first submission should appear almost instantly, although this depends on the level of demand on the TurnitinUK server at the time of submission. Please Page 6 of 7
note that for subsequent submissions there is a minimum time delay of 24 hours, which may be longer still if the demand on the service is high. 6. To view further paper information, select the small i icon at the bottom left of the screen. This will give a word and character count (Figure 11). Figure 11 - Further paper information Important Notice About Originality Reports It is worth stressing again that Originality Reports do not reflect TurnitinUK s assessment of whether a paper has or has not definitely been plagiarised. The Originality Report is simply a tool that is available to both students and module tutors to help gauge the possibility of plagiarism having taken place by finding sources that contain text similar to papers submitted by students. Students are expected to use the Originality Report feedback to highlight areas where there submission may need further work. For example, a properly referenced and genuinely attributed quotation in an essay may have been picked up by TurnitinUK. In such an instance that part of the Originality Report can be ignored, as long as the submission makes it clear that a work is being quoted and the source is properly referenced. In situations where students do engage in plagiarism, however, module tutors can use the Originality Report as a tool to help them uncover this and to find the original source material from which the work was lifted. The decision about whether to deem any work plagiarised or not will rest with the module tutor who will make this decision carefully, and only after careful examination of both the submitted paper and the suspect sources. eld, Information Services March 2015 Page 7 of 7