TurnItIn is a plagiarism-detection service that USD subscribes to. It allows instructors to check the percentage of matched text in a student’s paper to text in three data sources: 
- 24+ billion web pages crawled
- 250+ million archived student papers
- 120+ million articles from 110,000+ journals periodicals & books (information provided via turnitin.com)
Instructors can set a threshold for the number of consecutive words to exclude (so that short, common phrases aren’t flagged), can create sets of short comments to “tag” text in students’ papers (e.g. “Comma needed,” “Improper punctuation”) that can expand for an explanation when clicked, and can grade directly from the application. TurnItIn is highly customizable.
Reading the Originality Report in TurnItIn (from University of Ontario Institute of Tehcnology):
Filetypes accepted by TurnItIn (from turnitin.com)
Turnitin currently accepts the following file types for submission: MS Word (.doc), WordPerfect (.wpd), PostScript (.eps), Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML (.htm), Rich Text (.rtf) and Plain Text (.txt).
Additional Resources:
- Instructor Training on TurnItIn (very comprehensive – by topic)
- Advice on Best Practices for using TurnItIn.com
This page will be updated as the iTeam collects more resources. Please contribute your favorite TurnItIn resources in the comments!
