What is Turnitin?

TurnitinUK is an online service that enables Universities and lecturers to compare their students' assignments with a range of electronic sources, including other students' work. The service is supported by the JISC – the leading body supporting UK Universities in the use of ICT – as a valuable tool to help institutions, staff and students prevent and detect plagiarism.

The Turnitin software is in use at UWL, and can be accessed via Blackboard.

4.8 The University reserves the right to utilise electronic plagiarism detection services. The use of these systems allows the student and the University to check systematically for plagiarism, thus ensuring that all students’ work is original. These services search the internet and extensive databases of reference material and content submitted by other students to identify any duplication with the students’ submitted work.
Student Handbook 2012-2013

Your lecturers will normally tell you when assignment work is to be submitted to TurnitinUK. It is possible for lecturers to collect all your work electronically (either by email, or via a Blackboard Assignment) and then submit this to Turnitin themselves. However in practice they are more likely to ask you to submit the work directly to Turnitin, and make the Turnitin “Originality Report” visible to you. They may allow you to submit an early draft to Turnitin, then revise your assignment based on the report which is generated.

Features of the system

• simple electronic submisison of work - no need to queue in the School office
• lecturers can use the system to mark your work online, and provide you with feedback online
• student work is securely stored
• when you access Turnitin from within Blackboard, you have ready access to help pages, and a student manual

Technical issues?
please see our Turnitin FAQs