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Turnitin (Instructors) What is Turnitin? Turnitin Originality is plagiarism and AI checking software available for use in Canvas Assignments. If turned on by an instructor, it reports "Similarity Detection" findings and potential AI use for student work submitted through the Canvas Assignment tool.

What is Turnitin?  How to use Turnitin  AI Writing Detection Tool  The Student Experience  Can Turnitin be used w/o Canvas?

How to use Turnitin

• Step-by-Step Tutorial: Using Turnitin: Instructor Help

• You MUST enable Turnitin for each Canvas Assignment BEFORE students submit work. This allows students to agree to terms regarding the scanning of their work.
  • When creating or editing a Canvas Assignment, choose the Turnitin Originality pulldown option as shown below:

• Use SpeedGrader in Canvas to view your student submission Originality Reports.
  • Click on the Percentage Score inside SpeedGrader in Canvas to view details:

• When viewing the Similarity Report, click on the AI Percentage Score to see details:

AI Writing Detection through Turnitin

Turnitin includes AI writing detection capabilities as part of the Turnitin Originality report. This feature shows the possible percentage of a document that may have been generated by AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT).

Please proceed with caution when using this score as the state of AI-generated text is developing rapidly, making it difficult to be confident in the accuracy of the AI indicator score. It is possible to get false positives for overly redundant text and other types of writing the AI-detector has not been designed to review. Submissions must have at least 300 words of prose text in long-form writing to be given an AI score. Shorter submissions are not scored. We advise you to only use this information to start further discussions with your students.

• FAQs for Turnitin's AI writing detection capabilities
• Understanding false positives within Turnitin's AI writing detection capabilities
• How to prepare for and discuss the possibility of false positives within AI writing detection tools
• AI conversations: Handling false positives within AI writing detection tools (written for students)
• Academic integrity in the age of AI

The Student Experience

For students to submit work to a Canvas Assignment with Turnitin enabled, they must agree to the product's license agreement, and the following statement:

I agree to the tool's End-User License Agreement

By submitting this assignment, I agree that I have followed all Student Code of Conduct guidelines regarding academic dishonesty including plagiarism and cheating and the expectations outlined in the syllabus for this course. I will address any questions I have on the use of computer generated assistance programs, academic dishonesty, and/or the course syllabus expectations with my instructor.

Can Turnitin be used without Canvas?

CETL supports Turnitin Originality which must be used through Canvas Assignments.

Turnitin, LLC offers a different product for checking manuscripts and dissertations named iThenticate. Please contact Stephanie Thomas (slthomas@uidaho.edu) at the UofI Graduate School for help in accessing iThenticate.

Instructors should be mindful of policies regarding FERPA. Test your knowledge by
taking the FERPA Tutorial in VandalWeb under Personal Information.