Detect Plagiarism with Turnitin
To check student assignment submissions for potential plagiarism, you can enable Turnitin on your Canvas assignment. Turnitin will run a similarity report against documents in its repository, our institution’s repository, website content, periodicals, journals, and articles.
Steps:
- Create an assignment with the Submission Type Online. Choose the input method as file uploads and/or text entry.
- Select Turnitin in the Plagiarism Review option.
- Choose where to store submissions for future comparison.
- Note: If the assignment is a rough draft, you should select “Do not store the submitted papers”.
- Choose which repositories to compare submissions against and the appropriate Similarity Report exclusions and inclusions.
- Student papers submitted to Turnitin at other institutions
- Student papers submitted to Turnitin within SMU
- Current and archived web content that is publicly available
- Books, newspapers, and journals through Turnitin’s partnerships with publishers, library databases, digital reference collections, and subscription-based publications
- Exclude text appearing in the bibliography, works cited, or references sections of student papers from being checked for matches when generating Similarity Reports
- Exclude text appearing in quotes from being checked for matches when generating Similarity Reports
- You can opt to exclude small sources from the Similarity Report by a set number of words or a percentage. Turnitin looks at the size of a matching source and makes any necessary exclusions based on the threshold specified by you.
- The e-rater® grammar feedback technology, developed by ETS®, automatically checks submissions to an assignment for grammar, usage, mechanics, style and spelling errors; providing in-depth feedback with on paper marks.
- Choose when to show the Similarity Report to students.
Visit for additional information on interpreting the report.