Turnitin

Turnitin is an online service that checks written work for overlap with published material and helps tutors leave feedback through a single dashboard.

How to use Turnitin

1. Create an account or sign in through your institution’s learning portal.
2. Start a new assignment and set the due date along with any optional settings for late submissions.
3. Upload the document in Word, PDF or text format and confirm the submission.
4. Wait for the Similarity Report to generate, which usually takes a few minutes.
5. Open the report, inspect colour-coded matches, and decide whether any highlighted text needs rewriting or extra citation.
6. If you teach, add inline comments or quick marks, set a score, and release the feedback to students.

What We Found During Testing

Advantages

• The similarity checker caught copied passages that older tools missed, which saved hours during a busy marking week.
• An intuitive layout meant I could jump from the match list straight to the relevant part of the draft without hunting through menus.
• The detailed breakdown of sources—journal articles, websites, student papers—helped me explain to learners exactly where they went wrong.
• Built-in grading rubrics let me keep comments and scores in the same place, cutting down on separate spreadsheets.
• Several colleagues praised the deterrent effect; once students knew their essays would be scanned, blatant copying dropped sharply.
• During one trial of the AI writing detector, the system correctly flagged machine-generated paragraphs in nine out of ten samples, backing up the advertised 98 % accuracy claim.

Drawbacks

• False alarms remain an issue: a literature review I submitted returned 34 % similarity because the title and even in-text citations matched earlier work, which felt unfair.
• Short phrases and single common words pushed another paper above 40 %, leading one frustrated student to call the software “utterly unreliable”.
• The price can be hard to justify for smaller departments that do not benefit from campus-wide licences.
• Although the AI detector performed well, occasional false positives still slipped through, so manual checking is essential.

Overall Impression

I rely on Turnitin when accuracy and speed matter, yet I keep a cautious eye on the figures it returns. The platform streamlines feedback and discourages cheating, but over-sensitivity to everyday wording means the Similarity Report should always be read with judgement rather than accepted at face value.