How to Use Turnitin (Complete Beginner’s Guide)
It is literally the gold standard for teacher plagiarism checker across the world.
Whether you are a student submitting your first assignment or an educator grading a student’s work, Turnitin is intuitive and easy to use.
Appreciating the steps in this process is crucial to promoting academic integrity and avoiding plagiarism before it takes place; similarly, having some basic knowledge regarding how Turnitin fundamentally works will help immensely when we have to respond when things “go wrong”.
What Is Turnitin and How Does It Work?
Turnitin is an academic integrity solution that empowers educators and institutions to promote original thinking and writing in students by identifying unoriginal content.
Established in 1998, it has since been developed into an industry-leading, AI-driven tool to sort your content and ensure that no unsuspecting miscreants are spreading passive voice throughout their text.
The system does three principal kinds of examination on submitted documents:
Plagiarism Detection checks your text using a huge database of over 70 billion current and archived web pages, 1.8 billion student papers, more than 100 million articles from academic publishers and content from over 90,000 publications from around the world.
Matches appear highlighted in the similarity report when they are identified by Turnitin.
Similarity Checking goes beyond exact plagiarism by identifying paraphrased content, reworded sentences, and structural similarities. Even if you’ve changed words around, the Turnitin similarity scan tool can recognize when ideas or sentence structures closely mirror existing sources.
Who Can Use Turnitin? (Students, Teachers, Institutions)
How you can use Turnitin There is a huge difference between what you get to do in Turnitin for different roles within WWU. Knowing these differences also helps you avoid false expectations about features available to you.
Student Access Restrictions are not: It is important to know the difference. Students can’t usually get to Turnitin’s AI writing indicator or check things like this for themselves.
Instead, students are asked to submit their assignments through the learning-management system for their school (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle) and instructors run checks themselves. There are some institutions that have limited self-check portals, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
The Instructor Dashboard has access to all of Turnitin’s features. Instructors are able to set up assignments, view highly detailed similarity analysis reports, see AI detection results and feedback from Turnitin grading tools, and adjust assignment settings such as due date or allotting submissions.
What is an Institutional License: Turnitin operates on a subscription model; schools, colleges and universities purchase institution-wide access. Individual access requires institutional affiliation.
Pricing is on a per-student basis, usually at $3 to $10 per student annually. The subscription comes with everything: plagiarism scanning, AI verification and grading features.
How to Submit an Assignment on Turnitin (Step-by-Step)
Once you’ve got the hang of it, submitting is easy. Here’s precisely what goes down from login to confirmation:
Logging In is by logging in to your institution’s LMS (Learning Management System). The vast majority of students never interact with Turnitin’s website. Instead, you’ll log in to Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle with your student login.
Go to your course and locate an assignment with Turnitin enabled. To go to the assignment, select its hyperlink.
Document Format Uploading: Turnitin can accept most word processing file types including Microsoft Word (. doc,. docx), PDF files (. pdf), plain text (. txt), rich text format (. rtf), OpenOffice (. odt), WordPerfect (. wpd), and even HTML files (. htm,. html). Uploading file sizes can be as large as 100 MB and documents are required to be between 20 words to 800 pages.
One important limitation: As with many services to which you might upload documents, Turnitin is best at reading actual text, and will not be able to read scanned PDFs or image-only documents — so make sure that your uploaded PDF contains text, not just an image of text.
| File Format | Supported | Notes |
| Microsoft Word (.docx) | Yes | Most common format |
| PDF (.pdf) | Yes | Must contain text, not scanned images |
| Google Docs | Via integration | Download as .docx first |
| PowerPoint (.pptx) | Limited | Text extracted only, no formatting |
Understanding Turnitin Similarity Report
The similarity report is Turnitin’s most recognizable product; reading it well will either minimise anxiety or validate false bravado.
What the percentage matches mean: The match score suits the body of text that has been found in an online source, be it a paper or website. THIS IS NOT A PLAGIARISM RATING. 15% You have up to 2-3 tries to check your text The lower the number the lesser you need to worry about the same content being returned somewhere else (Save for proper citation, banal phrases in common use and anything you may have submitted yourself).
Color Codes Explained let you at a glance see how well your report does:
Blue (0-24%): Acceptable in most academic/educational settings. Low similarity to sources currently available.
Green (25–49%): Medium similarity, needs checking. Could be indication of too much use of quoted material or not enough change.
Yellow (50-74%): Medium to high similarity that needs looking at. Indicates problematic or excessive use of others’ text.
Red (75-100%): Similarity matches at this level show significant matching of text and may be too close to one another.
Misconceptions include the false belief that all likeness is plagiarism (no), 0% is original content (AI work has a score of 0%), lower scores are better (campus established papers have higher scores) and, finally, perceiving the similarity score as an F or A scale (grades depends on many things).
How to Read AI Detection Results in Turnitin
Turnitin’s AI detection feature, separate from similarity checking, specifically identifies content likely written by artificial intelligence.
AI Score vs Similarity Score are completely independent metrics. Your document receives two separate percentages: similarity score (plagiarism/matching) and AI writing indicator (0-100%). A document can have 5% similarity but 80% AI detection, or vice versa. The Turnitin AI analysis tool evaluates linguistic patterns independently from source matching.
What Is Considered Risky varies by institution, but general guidelines include:
0-20% AI: Minimal concern, within normal variation for human writing
21-50% AI: Moderate concern requiring instructor review
51-79% AI: High probability of AI assistance
80-100% AI: Very high confidence of AI-generated content
Common Mistakes Users Make While Using Turnitin
Knowing possible pitfalls enables you to circumvent unnecessary hassle and headaches during submission.
The re-submissions create a trap, as they are being handled as separate file by Turn-it-in. So if you submit a draft, delete it and then submit your actual piece of work.
Both works will be stored in the Turnitin database.” Your final submission will bear little resemblance to your own draft. In some cases, assignments are setup to permit only a single submission or ignore your previous submissions for matching.
Similarity Citations Triggering Similarity: occurs if well-formatted citations, bibliography or quotes contribute large sources to your similarity score.
Turnitin flags these matches even though they are accepted academic practice. Lecturers know this and usually Do NOT count the bibliography or quoted materials in assessing such report.
Setting up draft uploads Draft Uploads create a database record that remains even after the recording process uploads.
Tips to Reduce High Similarity Scores (Ethical Methods)
Legitimate strategies exist to minimize similarity while maintaining academic integrity:
Paraphrasing Properly means completely restructuring sentences, not just swapping synonyms. Bad paraphrasing changes ‘The economy grew rapidly’ to ‘The economy expanded quickly.’ Good paraphrasing transforms it to ‘Economic expansion occurred at an accelerated pace during this period.’ Change sentence structure, vary vocabulary, and add your own analytical perspective.
Citation Best Practices prevent legitimate sources from inflating your score:
- Use in-text citations immediately after paraphrased ideas, not just at paragraph end
- Include page numbers for direct quotes to demonstrate precision
- Distinguish clearly between your analysis and source material
Quoting Correctly requires strategic use of quotation marks. Only quote when the original wording is essential, unique, or particularly powerful. Excessive quoting suggests insufficient engagement with material. Most academic writing should contain less than 10% direct quotations, with the majority being paraphrased analysis and original argumentation.
FAQs About Using Turnitin
Can students check Turnitin themselves?
Generally no. Turnitin is generally only accessible to faculty at most schools. A small number of universities have introduced self-check portals for students, but it is not widespread. The logic, presumably, is that people would game that system — making small changes to documents and checking them back in many times over.
Is Turnitin 100% accurate?
Not one single plagiarism checker is right. Turnitin is great for finding exact and near-exact matches but it’s not so good at identifying subtle paraphrasing or translated plagiarism. Estimates see its AI detection at anywhere from 2-4% false positive, based on independent testing. Precision is particularly sensitive to database coverage and document quality.
Does Turnitin detect AI content?
Since April 2023, Turnitin features AI writing recognition that can detect text created by ChatGPT, GPT-4 and other language models. The detection examines sentence predictability, vocabulary consistency, and linguistic phenomena associated with AI-generated text. But highly edited AI work, or human-machine cooperation on a story, could in theory go undetected.
