TurnitinThe Turnitin Anti-Plagiarism Solution

Turnitin is a plagiarism prevention system that instantly identifies papers containing unoriginal material and acts as a powerful deterrent to stop student plagiarism before it starts. Turnitin's extensive database contains millions of published works, electronic books, and archived student papers, as well as indexes of billions of web pages for a thorough comparison and review of your students' submitted assignments.

Creating a Turnitin Assignment in Blackboard

  1. Login to Blackboard and proceed to your course site
  2. Click the Control Panel link
  3. Click Assignments under the Course Documents heading
  4. Select Turnitin Assignment from the Select: drop-down menu
  5. Click the Go button

    Turnitin Assignment

  6. Fill in the appropriate information in the Assignment Title and point value fields
  7. Use the drop-down menus to select the appropriate Dates of Availability (you must do this, otherwise the assignment will not appear to your students)
  8. Enter any specific instructions for the assignment in the text field available
  9. There are several advanced options for Turnitin Assignments. To see them, press the button. The options are shown below:


  10. Make desired selections
  11. Click the Submit button
  12. A confirmation screen will appear. Click the OK button

If you would like to perform a Roster Sync please do the following steps. This will sync up the Turnitin Assignment with your Blackboard Course Roster.

  1. After creating a Turnitin assignment, go to the Turnitin Assignments area of your control panel
  2. Click the View link underneath the Turnitin assignment
  3. On the following page, click the Roster Sync link
  4. You should see a list of all enrolled students. This will allow you to keep track of who has submitted a paper and who has not

Submitting a Turnitin Assignment as a Student

Your students will use the following steps to submit their papers:

  1. Login to Blackboard and navigate to the appropriate course
  2. Click the Assignments button
  3. Click the View/Complete link located under your Turnitin assignment
  4. Click the Submit icon
  5. Enter the appropriate information in the Submission Title field
  6. Click the Browse... button and navigate to the location of the saved file
  7. Select the document and click the Open button
  8. Click the Submit button
  9. You will see a preview of the paper appear. Choose to submit it or go back and select another document


  10. A digital receipt will appear, indicating the paper has been submitted.

Viewing Submitted Papers

To view the results of your students' submitted papers, do the following:

  1. Login to Blackboard and proceed to your course site
  2. Click the Control Panel link
  3. Click the Turnitin Assignments link located under the Course Tools heading
  4. Click the View link located under the appropriate submitted paper
  5. Under the report column you will see each student's originality score. To view the detailed report, click the student's originality score

  6. To view a paper, click on the blue underlined paper title
  7. To save a copy of a student paper to your computer hard drive, floppy disk, network drive, etc., click the paper icon under the file column to the right of the appropriate paper

Viewing Turnitin Originality Reports

Originality Reports will reveal the originality of your students' paper submissions based on the information within the extensive Turnitin database, assisting you in determining the validity of submitted assignments. To view a Turnitin Originality Report, do the following:

  1. Within your class site, click the inbox icon for the assignment
  2. When the Originality Report is ready (keep in mind that it can take a few minutes after paper submission), you will see a score under the report column. To access any paper's Originality Report, click on the score for the desired paper
  3. The color of the score shows how much matching text has been found within the submitted paper

    • Blue: less than 20 matching words
    • Green: 0-24% matching text
    • Yellow: 25-49% matching text
    • Orange: 50-74% matching text
    • Red: 75-100% matching text

Print Report

The Originarity Report displays as a side-by-side version, which makes comparing a student's paper and the original source easy. To print a report, click the printer icon at the top of the window.

Viewing Sources

To view a source, click on the source link in the Report text: section of the print report. If the source is a) an Internet source or b) a paper that is part of your class, the source will open in a separate window. If the source of matching text is a student paper from another instructor's class, Turnitin cannot provide direct access to the paper. To view the paper, you must request permission from the instructor in possession of the paper.

Reanalyzing Reports

Originality Reports include sources that are appropriately quoted. Once you have verified that the student correctly quoted the source, you can exclude the source from the report and have the report reanalyzed.

To exclude a source from a report, do the following:

  1. Click the links at the top of the report that read exclude quoted and/or exclude bibliography

  2. After each link is clicked a new report will be generated reflecting your change