How to submit your assignments to Turnitin

Turnitin is located on your unit Blackboard site. This means you need to:

• Log onto the SCU website, then onto MySCU, to log onto your unit site.
• Once on your unit site scroll down the left side of the screen until you see the ‘Assessment’ heading.
• Click on the button titled ‘Assessment and Task Submission’. You should find the Turnitin drop-box in this area.
• Look for the ‘View/Complete’ link. This indicates it is a Turnitin drop box.
• Start the process of checking your work by clicking on the ‘View/Complete’ link.

The idea is that you submit a ‘good version’ of your work and use the Similarity Report to check paraphrases, quotes, and referencing. Then submit the improved version for grading.

You can keep re-submitting to this drop-box as many times as you like up to assessment due date. The marker will only see your final submission and final Similarity Report. They will not know how many times you have used the drop box.

• Click on the ‘View/Complete’ link and you will be taken through to the Class Home Page. The important feature of this page is the big blue ‘Submit’ button located on the right side of the screen. Click this button to start the process.
• The first two fields on the next page will be filled in for you. Turnitin recognises you (because you have logged onto MySCU) and fills in your first and second names. The next field, ‘Submission title’ is mandatory. You need to fill it in. Most students note the assignment name (e.g. Assignment 1). The title is only visible on the report.
• Scroll down the screen and you will see the Originality Declaration. Carefully read this section. By submitting your work through the drop box you are declaring that you have read and understood SCU policy about academic misconduct, and that you are submitting ‘entirely your own work’.

This does not mean you are only drawing upon your own ideas. Submitting your own work means drawing upon credible, current sources to generate your own answer to the question, argument, or solution.

It also means:

• You have put in the effort expected
• You have mainly put sources into your own words (paraphrased)
• If you have used quotes they are correctly formatted and referenced
• You clearly show where your work ends and others’ work begins (usually via referencing).
• Keep scrolling down the page and you will see the function buttons that allow you to upload a file. The ‘Choose from this computer’ option is most resilient whether you are on campus or at home. I will show you how to use this option.
• Click on this button. A pop will appear that lets you see your computer. Click on the area where your file is located (e.g. a USB, in Documents or Desktop). Then click the folder or file and click on the ‘open’ button at the bottom right corner of your screen.
• Turnitin will show the file name on the screen. If you have selected the wrong file by mistake, click on ‘Clear file’ or ‘Cancel’ button. If it is the correct file, click on the big blue ‘Upload’ button at the bottom left corner of the screen.
• An icon will appear that shows a circle of dots and a message letting you know Turnitin is processing your submission.
• The next screen asks you to confirm that you have submitted the right file. Click the ‘Cancel’ button or ‘Confirm’ button at the bottom left corner of the screen.
• Turnitin will show a big green banner across the top of the next screen when the submission process is finished. Always look for this banner. It says ‘Congratulations- your submission is complete!’.
• Scroll down and you will see a big blue button at the bottom left corner of the screen ‘Return to assignment list’. Click on this button to go back to the Class Home Page.
• Once your Similarity Report has been processed it will be visible on the Class Home Page under the ‘Similarity’ heading. Look for the percentage and coloured icon. Click on the percentage to open up your report in the online browser.

Turnitin does not detect plagiarism

Turnitin is not a plagiarism detection tool. It is a text-matching software. Understanding how Turnitin works will help you avoid study stress and use this software to your advantage.

Turnitin is a text-matching software:

• It compares your work to sources held in its repository (and the repository is updated every day and contains student papers from SCU and other universities around the world that use Turnitin, internet pages, online books, online journals, conference papers and so on)
• It identifies text (or strings of words) in your submission that match sources held in its repository

• Then it generates a summary of all the matched-text it identifies. That summary is called the Similarity Report (or sometimes it is called an Originality Report).

The Similarity Report:

• Highlights, colour codes and numbers sections of matched-text it finds in your submission
• The colour coding and numbering is to show you the sources in its repository that share matched text with your submission.
• If you look at highlighted sections in your report you will see the colours and numbers correspond with sources listed in the ‘Match Overview’.
• Your marker understands that sources listed in the Match Overview share text with your submission, but that does not necessarily mean you used the sources when writing your assignment.

However, highlighting, colour-coding, and numbering sections of matched-text is the most Turnitin can do.

Turnitin cannot make any judgements about the nature of the matched-text. This means:

• Turnitin does not have the capacity to judge whether you have referenced correctly and consistently
• Turnitin cannot tell whether quotes and paraphrases are properly used in your work
• We, as students and teachers, need to interpret the Similarity Report ourselves, and double-check sources have been used correctly.

By highlighting matched-text in your submission Turnitin helps you to double-check you have used paraphrases, quotes, and referencing correctly. This means Turnitin is a really useful learning tool, especially for new students. Because Turnitin cannot detect plagiarism, we need to do this for ourselves, using the Similarity Report as a tool.

Professor Robin Stonecash discusses Academic Integrity

I’m here to talk about academic integrity today. This is an important subject for everybody in the university. It’s important for students, it’s important for the academics who teach you, and it’s important for me as the Executive Dean, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts because we rely on our reputation. And believe it or not academic integrity is part of our reputation. If we don’t show that we’re doing the right thing by the students and that we’re ensuring that they actually learn and know what we say they learn and know then we’re really not giving you anything that’s worth very much value. And employers won’t want to employ you and your fellow students won’t know that you’ve done the work that you say you have done unless we engage in good academic practice. And that is what academic integrity is all about.

So how does a student avoid academic misconduct for example? Well you can do your own work. You can ask others for help but make sure you put it into your own words. If you quote from a source whether it be on the internet or a video clip that you pick up off of the internet, or whether it’s taking some words that are from another paper make sure that you reference it. And by referencing it what I mean is giving the author’s name, the date, the source of where you found the publication, and make sure that you put that into your paper.

And why is it so important? As I said it’s really important because we need to know that you actually know what you say you know. And we can’t mark you on it otherwise. There are very, very serious consequences to academic misconduct. If you engage in academic misconduct you may fail your subject, you most certainly will fail that assignment that you engaged in academic misconduct on, and if you fail the subject, the unit, you may very well get excluded from the university. So it’s a serious matter.

So I’d really like you to consider the next time you do an assignment ask yourself is all of this my work? Can I acknowledge the sources that I used to help me write this assignment? Have I acknowledged if I have worked with another student on an assignment for example? Make sure that it is your own work because academic integrity is all about owning what it is that you’ve done. And it’s really important to us at the university and it’s important to you.