Turnitin - Using Turnitin with Canvas [UW-Madison]
Turnitin is an academic integrity tool that is integrated with Canvas at UW-Madison. Instructors can enable Turnitin on assignments to see how or if content in student submissions match materials within Turnitin's repositories. Turnitin's repositories includes materials like other students' work, scholarly articles, and other content from the internet.
Turnitin is only available for use in for-credit, timetable courses. Because of this, Turnitin is primarily accessed through Canvas as described in this document. If you are an instructor of a for-credit course, and need to use Turnitin outside of Canvas, please Get Help from DoIT to request access.
If you're a student at UW-Madison, and you would like to learn how to view the similarity results for your assignment submissions, please refer to Canvas - Accessing Your Turnitin Similarity Report (Student) [UW-Madison]
How to Configuring Canvas Assignments with Turnitin
Here are steps for an instructor to configure a Canvas assignment to send student submissions to Turnitin:
- Navigate to your Canvas course and create a new assignment or edit an existing assignment.
- Scroll down to the Submission Type settings. Select the Online option from the dropdown box, and check the File Uploads checkbox.
- Scroll down to the Plagiarism Review section and select Turnitin from the dropdown box. After a moment, will open the Turnitin settings menu.
- Use the Store Submissions In dropdown box to choose how or if student submissions will be stored in Turnitin:
- Papers submitted to the Standard repository will be held by Turnitin. All Turnitin customers can check student submissions against others in the standard repository.
- Papers submitted to the Institutional repository will be held by Turnitin within our specific UW-Madison repository. Other instructors at UW-Madison will be able to check their students' materials against this repository.
- Do not store submitted papers allows instructors to compare student submissions against Turnitin’s standard repository (which includes articles, encyclopedias, and other works) and UW-Madison's repository (containing only UW-Madison students' work) without submitting their students' work to the repository.
- Choose what kinds of materials you would like to check student submissions against and modify other parameters of the similarity report as desired
- Use the Show report to students dropdown box to indicate when or if you would like students to be able to view their similarity report. You can chose to allow students to access the report immediately after submitting their assignment, after the assignments are graded, or never.
- Use the Save button at the bottom of the page to save your assignment settings.
Now, when students submit their work to the assignment, their submissions will be sent to Turnitin, and a similarity report will be generated.
Accessing the Turnitin Similarity Report
You can access the Turnitin similarity report for a student's submission through Canvas SpeedGrader.
In Canvas SpeedGrader there will be a box including a percentage indicating the submission's Turnitin similarity score. Clicking this box allows instrcutors to view the submission within Turnitin Feedback Studio and access the full similarity report.
Interpreting the Similarity Report
The similarity report highlights any sections of the submission that match text found in the comparison set. The report also has a similarity score, indicating how much of the submission content matches content the comparison set (as configured in the assignment settings). See this Turnitin page for more information: Understanding the Similarity Report.
For more documentation about using Turnitin, please visit Turnitin’s help guides. If you have other questions or need additional help setting Turnitin up with your Canvas assignments, please contact the DoIT Help Desk.