Turnitin Setup and Tips

Owned by Justin Aakre
Last updated: Mar 04, 2024
3 min read

Turnitin is a great tool to assist in detecting plagiarism or AI detection. This tool is not perfect; continue to use personal discretion when reading over students' work.

Assignment Setup

To enable Turnitin for an assignment

  1. Access the assignment settings. This can be done during assignment creation or by editing the assignment.
  2. Scroll down to the settings section for Turnitin called "Turnitin plagiarism plugin settings."
  3. Set "Enable Turnitin" to Yes.
  4. Update any other Turnitin settings desired (see below for tips).
  5. Click Save at the bottom.

Forum Setup

While most forums don't necessitate the use of Turnitin, it is available. This is also the recommended method to check Turnitin for any work that hasn't already been checked. For example, an assignment didn't have Turnitin enabled prior to the student's submission. By creating a hidden forum from students with Turnitin enabled, you can run a check on a submission and get Turnitin's feedback on the submission in a few minutes.

  1. Access the forum settings. This can be done during forum creation or by editing the forum.
  2. Scroll down to the settings section for Turnitin called "Turnitin plagiarism plugin settings."
  3. Set "Enable Turnitin" to Yes.
  4. Update any other Turnitin settings desired (see below for tips).
  5. Click Save at the bottom.

Turnitin Plugin Settings

There are a variety of settings available to tailor the Turnitin tool. For most assignments, the defaults can be left as-is. However, there may be a use case to change some of these values depending on type of assignment or field of study.

Listed are the settings where known use cases could/should mandate a setting change:

Display Similarity Reports to Students - This allows students to be able to see the Similarity and AI detection scores.

Store Student Papers - This should be turned off for rough drafts. If a student writes a paper, has it submitted to Turnitin and stored, makes updates and submits it again: Turnitin will flag the final draft against the rough draft.

Report Generation Speed - There are three options for the setting. I have seen various use cases for all three.

Exclude Small Matches - This is primarily for the sciences or fields where common phrases exist that do not have perfect alternatives.

AI Detection

Turnitin offers an additional feature in AI detection. This feature is used to assist in catching students who have used AI, such as ChatGPT, to complete their assignment. To view the AI detection, you will need to click into the Similarity report. It is not viewable from the Moodle assignment or forum page. It is shown in the lower right hand corner in a blue box. To learn more about the requirements of the feature or why it may not be displaying a score, check out the AI Writing Detection Requirements. 

Best Tips for Troubleshooting

The most common issue I see involving Turnitin is when the Red x appears with direction to Resubmit to Turnitin. In the case of the screenshot, hovering over the red x gives the message: "Turnitin has returned an error with your submission: Your submission must contain 20 words or more." In this case, I would download the assignment, copy all the text into Notepad (Notepad is a simple text editor program on Windows), copy the text back into Microsoft Word or Google Docs, and save the document as a PDF. Once I have the PDF without any additional formatting, I would resubmit the docuemnt to Turnitin through a hidden forum as described above.