Turnitin

Turnitin helps instructors check students’ work for improper citation or potential plagiarism by comparing it against numerous online databases. Turnitin is available to instructors and students through Canvas only. Georgetown offers two Turnitin tools in Canvas, both of which are enabled through a Canvas Assignment.

As of October 2023, Georgetown has turned off Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature in its similarity checks because of the main campus faculty executive committee and the Honor Council’s concerns about the tool’s accuracy and in the belief that the harms of false positives are worse than any advantages of the tool. Many institutions have done the same.

Georgetown Turnitin FAQs

What are the differences between the Turnitin External Tool and Turnitin’s Plagiarism Review (Plagiarism Framework) tool?

Use this chart to review feature differences between the two options.

Can I use Turnitin outside of Canvas?

All access and use of Turnitin at Georgetown is done so through Canvas. For fairness reasons, the Honor Council recommends that faculty using Turnitin should submit all students’ papers in a course instead of only problematic papers. Please reference the Honor Council’s page on how to use Turnitin.

Can I create a Turnitin account outside of Canvas using my Georgetown credentials?

Georgetown’s license with Turnitin no longer allows for the creation of new accounts on the Turnitin.com website directly. Users who currently have an account on Turnitin.com can view old submissions and reports by logging into turnitin.com, but all new Turnitin assignments must be created in Canvas.

I’m a faculty/staff member, can I use Turnitin to check my own work for originality?

According to our end user license agreement with Turnitin, faculty and staff cannot use it for anything besides originality checks for work submitted in registered courses.

How do I set up a draft submission in Turnitin?

As long as the “Draft” and the “Final” Turnitin assignments are within the same course, and submitted by the same student, Turnitin will not return a match based on a previous submission of the same paper. If a student submits the same paper to multiple assignments (including revision assignments) in the same class they will not match each other. This is to allow students and instructors to use the Turnitin Similarity Reports as part of a review/resubmit process without generating a “false positive”.

Alternatively, in the Turnitin assignment settings the instructor can select the “Do not store the submitted papers” option. By not saving the assignment submissions in the Turnitin database it will ensure that the final assignment submissions will not return a match.

How do I use Canvas rubrics with a Turnitin External Tool assignment?

Currently, there no way to add a Canvas rubric after creating a Turnitin External Tool assignment. The work-around for this is to create a Canvas assignment the normal way (i.e. not selecting External Tool as the Submission Type), which will allow you to add a Canvas rubric. After the Canvas rubric is added, edit the assignment, change the Submission Type to External Tool and then select Turnitin External Tool. You can then access the Canvas rubric through the SpeedGrader when grading students. Note: The Turnitin Plagiarism Review tool is recommended when using Canvas rubrics.  

Turnitin Troubleshooting

I’m having problems accessing Turnitin, is the system down?

Check the Turnitin Service Status.

Why am I getting an error message when submitting a PDF file?

Students will get the following error message upon submitting copy/print protected or password protected PDFs:

Sorry, we could not process your request.
Your submission does not contain valid text.
Please try again.

Note: When a copy/print-protected or password protected PDF gets submitted into Turnitin, the protection is removed and the downloaded file can be printed. The text on the page, however, is not selectable.

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