Turnitin (Academic Integrity)
Turnitin is an online plagiarism prevention software. It helps promote originality in student work, improve student writing/research skills, encourage collaborative learning, and save instructors time. Turnitin is integrated into UofM’s learning management system, Canvas, to make checking the originality of students’ assignments a seamless task. The information below provides resources on how to enable Turnitin in Canvas assignments, how to enable your Turnitin account (if you are not using the Canvas integration), and Turnitin’s new AI Writing Detection tool.
Where Do I Begin?
Update yourself with the current UofM policies regarding academic integrity. These are listed in the student handbook (PDF) and faculty handbooks.
Read the Faculty Legal Advisory Statement provided by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding Turnitin use by your students. You should also include this statement in your student syllabus:
Your written work may be submitted to Turnitin.com or a similar electronic detection method for rating originality of your ideas and evaluating the proper use of assignment sources. As part of this process, you may be required to submit an electronic as well as hard copies of your work. By taking this course, you agree that all assignments may undergo this review process. The assignment may be included as a source document in Turnitin.com's restricted-access database. It is solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism in such documents. Assignments not submitted according to the instructor's procedures may be penalized or may not be accepted at all.” (Office of Legal Counsel, October 11, 2018)
Enabling Turnitin in Canvas
Instructions to enable Turnitin in Canvas.
Enabling an account on Turnitin.com
If you are not using the Canvas integration, submit a Turnitin service request to have your account activated.
Next Steps
Learn the components of the Similarity Report within Turnitin
Note: When requesting the deletion of papers from the database you MUST have the following information: Instructor email, Submission ID Number, Class ID Number, and Assignment Name. To request a deletion of a paper in Turnitin, please use the Service Request System.
Turnitin's AI Writing Detection
Turnitin released the AI Writing Detection tool in April 2023 to help instructors detect the use of AI writing tools, including ChatGPT, in students’ written work using Turnitin’s Similarity Report. The short video below shows how AI Writing Detection works via the Turnitin Canvas integration.
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Turnitin Disclaimer:
Our AI writing assessment is designed to help educators identify text that might be prepared by a generative AI tool. Our AI writing assessment may not always be accurate (it may misidentify both human and AI-generated text) so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student. It takes further scrutiny and human judgment in conjunction with an organization's application of its specific academic policies to determine whether any academic misconduct has occurred.
Additional Resources
Turnitin has also created a AI Writing Detection FAQs to answer questions on how the Turnitin AI detection model works, how to access it, what the indicator and report show, etc.
Please note that for this release, AI detection will only work for long-form writing submitted in English. It will not process any non-English submissions.
For additional resources, view Turintin's AI Writing Detection Feature Guidance document.
Turnitin Features
Please take a moment to explore the features that are available with Turnitin at the UofM.