Using Turnitin in Bruin Learn
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a plagiarism prevention tool available within Bruin Learn, often used to enhance the educational experience for students. Turnitin is a tool used to both educate students regarding proper citation and referencing proficiency along with providing the instructor with confidence in regard to the academic integrity of students’ work.
There are three main uses of Turnitin:
- To act as a deterrent against plagiarism.
- To provide reports which can help identify occurrences of plagiarism.
- To provide students with a tool to identify and correct possible occurrences of plagiarism in their own work and improve their academic writing.
Turnitin compares students’ written submissions to publications, websites, and its database of student work. A Similarity Score and Similarity Report is produced for each submission.
- Similarity Score is the percentage of the submission which matches Turnitin’s sources.
- Similarity Report details which parts of the submission match or are highly similar to text from other sources.
The feedback does not assess whether the submission includes plagiarized material; further interpretation of results is necessary.
Recommendations
- Familiarize yourself with UCLA institutional and departmental policies regarding academic misconduct and plagiarism: Plagiarism and Student Copyright.
- Disclose upfront to students your intention to use Turnitin. Explain why you have chosen to use it and how it benefits the students. Establish policies and procedures for students and clearly communicate these policies in class. In addition, relevant institutional or departmental policies should be included in the syllabus.
- Avoid making assumptions about students’ understanding of plagiarism. By educating students on plagiarism, how to prevent it, and the importance of academic integrity, you help prevent unintentional plagiarism and better prepare students.
- Turnitin is used by many institutions, and as such, can experience heavy traffic at the end of terms. It is possible that Similarity Scores and Reports may take a long time to generate at some instances. You can consult the Turnitin Status Page Links to an external site. if you are experiencing difficulty with the tool, or contact bruinlearn-support@it.ucla.edu.
- Why would I use an external app?
Creating an Assignment using Turnitin
- From the Course Navigation bar, select Assignments
- Click +Assignment
- After entering an Assignment name into the box provided and customizing the instructions, points, and other details, in the Submission Type option, select Online submission and under Online Entry Options, check Text Entry and/or File Upload.
If students upload PDFs of their work via File Upload, image-based PDFs cannot be read, and will not produce a Similarity Score. Remind students to save their work as a text-based PDF, or check the Restrict Upload File Types option to have students only upload Word Doc files. - In the Plagiarism Review drop-down menu, select Turnitin Plagiarism Framework.
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Customize the following Turnitin plagiarism settings:
- The default submission storage is in the Standard paper repository. You can also choose Do not store the submitted papers..
- Choose which repositories student papers will be checked against in producing the Similarity Score. You can read more in Choosing comparison repositories Links to an external site..
- Choose when you would like the Similarity Report to be made available to your students. You can read more in Setting Similarity Report visibility Links to an external site..
- Configure the rest of the assignment options (Group Assignment, Peer Review, Due Dates) and select Save & Publish or Save at the bottom of the page. Note: You have to publish assignments to make them available to students.
The Similarity Report can be accessed from within SpeedGrader. Visit Accessing the Similarity Report Links to an external site. to learn how.
Grading a Turnitin Assignment in Bruin Learn
Turnitin Assignments are graded in Bruin Learn in the same way as other assignments, by using SpeedGrader. While Turnitin’s Feedback Studio is viewable in Bruin Learn, any grade or comments you leave for students there will not be transferred into SpeedGrader, and students will not receive them.
If you need help with this tutorial, please contact bruinlearn-support@it.ucla.edu.
Accessing Past Turnitin Submissions from CCLE
CCLE will no longer be available for use on November 18, 2022. To access a Turnitin submission submitted via CCLE after that date, students and instructors will need to log into turnitin.com Links to an external site. directly. Your login email address would be your LogonID@ucla.edu (E.g. "joebruin@ucla.edu"). The first time you log in, you will need to follow these password reset instructions Links to an external site. to set a password.