Turnitin

Turnitin and academic integrity

UTAS uses many approaches to promote academic integrity, foremost is the experience and expertise of its teaching staff and their knowledge of the literature within a discipline. There is a separate site dedicated to academic integrity at UTAS.

Turnitin is one tool available to staff and students to assist in achieving the ideals of academic integrity.

What Turnitin does

  • Turnitin matches the written text in any electronic document submitted for comparison to all the other documents stored in its databases
  • Turnitin produces an originality report which allows checking for sections of text that have matched other documents residing in the Turnitin databases. In some contexts it can also be useful to identify incorrect punctuation and incorrectly cited references.
  • Document formats that are acceptable for uploading are:
    • Microsoft Word™ (.doc and .docx)
    • Corel WordPerfect®
    • HTML
    • Adobe PostScript®
    • Plain text (.txt)
    • Rich Text Format (.rtf)
    • Portable Document Format (.pdf)
  • The file size may not exceed 20MB, files of larger size may be reduced in size by removal of non-text content (e.g. images)
  • Turnitin cannot analyse images

What Turnitin does NOT do

  • Turnitin is NOT anti-plagiarism software
  • Turnitin does NOT identify all potential cases of plagiarism
  • Turnitin does NOT differentiate between correctly cited and unattributed work

Understanding the Originality Report

  • Understanding the format of the originality report will give you more of an idea of how you should better correct your work
  • Understanding where the information comes from within an originality report will also help you address your concerns as a student when you read your report
  • It will also allow you to understand the copy of your lecturers originality report on your assignment

Improving and promoting academic integrity

  • By fostering reflective thought during the preparation stages of your writing, you will have a better chance of understanding the information you are about to present within your documents
  • You can understand and apply changes based on the information received from your originality report
  • You will also have a better understanding of your lecturer's feedback received as part of the assessment process within your UTAS units
  • By reading this advice and using the strategies mentioned here you can enhance your current writing skills and improve not only the quality of your submitted documents but your overall approach and understanding toward the idea of academic integrity in higher education