If you create a Turnitin Assignment in your Moodle course, Turnitin will compare all of the documents submitted by your students to its database of previously submitted assignments, documents in online paper mills, documents available on the Web, etc. Turnitin then issues an "Similarity" score that indicates how much of the language of each student essay matches those other sources. Match scores in the low teens and below don't tend to be problematic, since passages quoted in the student essay, common phrases, book or article titles, etc., will often show up as matches. Match scores in the high teens and above definitely deserve close scrutiny.
Here's how you see the originality scores for a Turnitin Assignment:
- Go to your Moodle course, and click on the link for the Turnitin Assignment.
- Turnitin will display general information about the assignment (Title, Start Date, Due Date, etc.). Below that will be a list of students in your course, along with information about the essays that they submitted to the Turnitin Assignment. Please note that you may need to click on the "Refresh Submissions" link just under that summary to force Turnitin to update its information about the student similarity scores.
- The Similarity column will display the match score for all submitted assignments. To see a detailed comparison of the student submission with matched sources, click on the match score to open the Turnitin Feedback Studio window, which also allows you to grade the student assignment and to provide feedback:
- The Turnitin Feedback Studio window will load, and matches with online sources will be highlighted and color-coded. You can click on the "Match Overview" number on the right-hand side of the page to see a list of all the sources that matched with the paper, in decreasing order of match amount:
- You can also click on one of the sources listed in that overview to see the specific matches.
Please note that Turnitin does not display the text of matches from papers submitted by students at other universities. You would need to send a request (via the Feedback Studio interface) before Turnitin will release that information to you.
In general, matches in the low teens and below are not problematic, since Turnitin matches titles, quotations, common phrases, etc. Match scores in the high teens and above definitely merit close scrutiny.
- Turnitin also displays an "AI" score at the bottom-right corner of its match scores, indicating its sense of how much of the submission was likely created by generative AI:
