Turnitin is an integration within the Blackboard VLE used to check references and submit work for assessment.
Here you can find our student video guidance and helpful FAQs.
Avoiding Plagiarism
For advice and guidance on Academic Integrity and plagiarism, the University of Worcester Study Skills website provides useful information for students.
Student guidance for Similarity Reports
In the first instance, you should speak to your academic tutor, for help interpreting your report. Turnitin also has some information on understanding your report.
Assignment Feedback in Turnitin
Watch our support video about how to view your Turnitin Feedback in the Blackboard VLE.
When you submit work through Turnitin, a report will be generated to prompt you to check your work and make amendments. This is called a score, however it is not scoring your work. It is flagging up text matches to help you identify where you may need to modify a citation, check a paraphrase, or find a more suitable source.
There is no official percentage boundary at the University of Worcester. Each report should be reviewed individually to ensure that all sources are correctly referenced.
No. A high score is not necessarily a result of plagiarism. There are various reasons why your similarity report could have a high percentage match for example, your assignment could be based on a template, or it could be made up of lots of small percentage matches. Other reasons may include the overuse of direct quotes or it may be matching your reference list. This is why it is important to review your report and identify where the source matches are located.
A low match could indicate that small sections of the work have been plagiarised or it could indicate other problems with your academic writing.
When producing your report, Turnitin can occasionally alter some of the formatting within your assignment. You do not need to worry about this as your tutor can download a copy of the original submitted file at any time.
Turnitin does not automatically email a submission receipt. You will need to download the receipt from the assignment submission dashboard. Here are the instructions on how to do this, in our video guidance.
View your feedback by going back to the original assignment submission point where you submitted your assignment. Your feedback will only be available after the feedback release date set by your tutor. This video shows you how to access your feedback once you have located your assignment.
In the first instance, you should speak to your academic tutor, for help interpreting your report. They may then wish to refer you to an Academic Liaison Librarian, for help with your citations and referencing, or to the Centre for Academic English and Skills, for help with paraphrasing or other aspects of your academic writing. The Turnitin website also has some basic information on interpreting your report: Understanding the similarity score for students – Turnitin Guides
In the first instance, you should contact the module tutor.
You should ensure you are using one of the recommended browsers (which are Chrome or Firefox). You will need to have third-party cookies enabled for the UW Blackboard VLE website, by adding this as an exception in your browser settings. Ensure you have saved and closed your document before attempting to upload it to Turnitin. Check that the submission point is set up to allow you to submit by viewing the summary page. This tells you the assignment deadline date and whether resubmissions are allowed etc. If you are still having problems submitting, please contact your tutor.
Please watch this video for instructions showing how to submit your Turnitin assignment.
Turnitin is a text matching software. When an item is submitted by the student, depending on how the tutor has set up the submission point, it can check the student’s submission against the following:
- Other student papers in the student paper repository
- Current and archived web site content
Periodicals, journals and publications
