Turnitin Assignment feedback guide

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 Conversely, an assignment with 0% matched text may be plagiarised from unpublished, offline or purchased from an essay mill.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.

Multiple Markers

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.

Staff Narratives

School AMPs need to specify what markers should submit when alleging possible misconduct. The Turnitin report provides useful supporting evidence to aid markers, but the report alone is not sufficient in providing the details of alleged misconduct.

One possible approach is to require markers to provide a brief narrative to accompany a Turnitin report. Two examples are provided here.

1. “The Turnitin report identifies unattributed copying from at least 4 key sources. There is significant copying from references [1], [2], [4] and [12] highlighted in the plagiarism report. Reference [1] (e.g. pp.3‐4; p.15; pp.25‐27) in particular makes this unacceptable. In several cases (e.g. but not limited to p.3, 4, 15, 26), there is verbatim copying with only a general reference to the source (no quotation marks or page references). There are also many further instances, where material is copied without even a reference to the source. The conclusion section is of particular concern as it copies the conclusions of [4] without any attribution.”

Or

2. “The Turnitin report has identified a 12% match with work from Student XXX. In particular, pp.1‐2 in the introduction section contain 15 lines of identical material; the discussion section (pp.8‐9) contains two paragraphs of material that contains some rewording, but as evidenced by the Turnitin report, clearly comes from a common source as Student XXX’s work on p.9. The coursework instructions clearly stated that this submission must be entirely the student’s own work, so submissions from both students should be submitted to the AMP for consideration.”

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 contact the Module Leader for all internal paper view requests. To reduce the risk of data breaches, 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.

We will review the similarity threshold at which we contact module leaders regarding external paper view requests in February 2023. 

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.

What content needs to be redacted?

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)"

When can I decline a request to view the text of an assignment?

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.