Turnitin does not tell you if a student has plagiarised, it provides you with information on which you can make a judgement. We often get asked
what percentage of matched text is acceptable?
There is no answer for this. For example, an annotated bibliography assignment might have a high instance of matched text, because of the use of quotations and use of common phrases. Conversely, an assignment with 0% matched text may be plagiarised from unpublished, offline or purchased from an essay mill. Identifying academic misconduct in a student assignment relies on academic judgement.
If you have multiple markers on an assignment which uses similarity reports, agree a consistent approach to filtering your similarity reports. For example, agree that all markers will filter out quotations and bibliographies.
Appendix 2 of the University's Academic Academic Integrity & Misconduct Policy and Guidance provides guidance on types of academic misconduct cases and section 1.6.6 provides an overview of evidence that could be provided. The evidence may or may not include a Turnitin report. The report alone is not sufficient in providing the details of alleged misconduct. An academic interpretation has to be provided alongside the report
From 2nd November 2022, requests to view papers submitted to Turnitin assignments at City St George's (Clerkenwell & Moorgate campuses) will be received by an email address managed by the Digital Education team. The Digital Education team will only contact module leaders with external paper view requests where the similarity match is 25% or over. For requests to view papers submitted to assignments at Bayes, AQS will also be emailed.
The module leader can reply to the email from the Digital Education team with their decision. They can decide to release the paper, release the paper with redactions, decline to release the paper or ask follow up questions of the requestor prior to making a decision on whether to release the paper.
If you decide to release a paper, you will first need to redact confidential information. Review the paper for instances of the student’s name or other confidential information in the text of the assignment. Remove the text and replace with the following information: "Student name removed - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)" or "Confidential Information removed - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)"
You may decide to decline a request due to an insignificant match. You can also decline internal and external requests if the paper contains sensitive, personal or commercially sensitive information.
