Use Turnitin with Canvas Assignments¶

When you create a Canvas assignment, or edit an existing assignment, you can easily enable a Turnitin plagiarism review for student submissions.

The best part about using Turnitin through Canvas is that neither you nor your students need to set up or maintain an account with Turnitin. Canvas does all of the communicating with Turnitin for you. If you’ve used Turnitin before, you no longer need to visit their website to create courses or have assignments checked.

Enabling Turnitin in Canvas assignments¶

In your Canvas course, click on the Assignments link in your Course Navigation Menu.
Click on the + Assignment button.
Add your assignment details and settings.
In the Submission Type section, select Online from the dropdown menu.
Under the Online Entry Options heading, chose the File Uploads option.
- Plagiarism review also works with the Text Entry option. You can enable this entry option if you want students to submit written content through Canvas's built-in Rich Content Editor.
Click on the dropdown menu in the Plagiarism Review section, and select Turnitin.
Configure your preferred settings for the Turnitin plagiarism review.
Use the dropdown menu under the Show report to students section to determine when or whether you would like students to be able to view their similarity report for this assignment.
Click on Save & Publish to save your assignment settings and make the assignment available to students.

Important Notes¶

Students' submitted documents must include more than 20 words in order for Turnitin to approve them for review.
If a student resubmits their assignment, their new similarity report will take at least 24 hours to appear.

Reviewing Turnitin similarity reports¶

Once a student submits an assignment, it will be sent to Turnitin to be checked for plagiarism. It can take up to 24 hours for Turnitin to complete its review and make the results available in your Canvas course.

When a similarity report is ready for you to review, a colored flag will appear in the assignment column in your Canvas Gradebook. You can view the similarity report by following the steps below:

Navigate to a student's submission within SpeedGrader.
In the submission details column at the right side of the page, you will see a colored box or flag icon with a percentage inside it.
Click on this icon to view the similarity report on Turnitin's website.

The color of the similarity report icon indicates the range that a student's similarity score falls into, based on the percentage of the student's work that matches resources in Turnitin's database:

🟦 Blue: No matching text
🟩 Green: One word to 24% matching text
🟨 Yellow: 25-49% matching text
🟧 Orange: 50-74% matching text
🟥 Red: 75-100% matching text

For guidance on how to best interpret similarity reports, please refer to the following resources from Turnitin:

How students can review their similarity report¶

If you’ve allowed students to review their similarity reports, they will see a colored similarity report icon next to their assignment on the Grades page in Canvas. The icon will also appear on their assignment submission page. Clicking on the icon will allow students to view their report on Turnitin's website.

Note: If, when you initially created your assignment, you chose not to allow your students to see their similarity reports, you can change this setting — even after the reports have been generated — by following the steps below:

Navigate to your assignment in Canvas.
Click on the Edit button at the top right of the screen.
Scroll down to the Plagiarism Review section of your assignment settings.
Click on the dropdown menu under the Show report to students subheading.
Select Immediately, After the assignment is graded, or After the due date, depending on your preferences.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Save button.

How Turnitin works¶

It’s important to review each similarity report carefully. Just because the similarity score is high doesn’t necessarily mean the paper has been plagiarized. It’s up to you as the instructor to review the report and determine whether plagiarism has actually occurred. Turnitin will simply find matches of groups of text and show those to you. It could very well be that the student simply hasn’t cited text properly, which can make it appear as copied.

Turnitin looks for text matches of seven words or more in three separate areas:

Papers submitted previously to Turnitin
Current and archived sites on the Internet
Collections of periodicals and journals (some but not all)

Return to the main Turnitin page