What Grad Students Need to Know about the Livingston Lord Library

What is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a plagiarism detection tool that can help improve your writing skills by identifying areas where you might have included unoriginal content in their writing. After submitting their writing to a Turnitin enabled D2L Assignment, Turnitin will compare their writing to article databases and other information available online. Turnitin can also run a grammar and writing mechanics check on their paper. The Similarity Report will highlight key areas in their work, showing a breakdown of matching sources.

For many of your classes, your professors will have already activated Turnitin in D2L. If they have NOT and you'd like to check your writing, please go to D2L and self-enroll through the University Writing Support Center's Turnitin course page.

If you need assistance with access Turnitin in D2L, follow the instructions below.

Detecting Plagiarism from the Center for Online Education

Professors have plenty of tools that allow them to identify plagiarism. There are several websites where they can input a student’s work and learn whether any component of the assignment has been lifted from previous scholarship. Some of the more common tools include:

• Dupli Checker: A simple, accurate and free tool. You can copy and paste or upload content to be scanned for plagiarism within seconds. If you need to perform several searches, you will be required to register.
• Glatt Plagiarism Self-Detection Test: Glatt provides a ROUGH estimate that plagiarism has or has not occurred. Based on the percentage of correct answers, the test results are intended to be used to help you become aware of text which you may have inadvertently plagiarized.
• Grammarly: A popular plagiarism and proofreader that’s used by many universities in the United States. Monthly, quarterly, and annual subscriptions are available, but there are a number of tools you can use for free.
• MOSS - (Measure of Software Similarity) - Detects Programming Plagiarism Moss is an automatic system for determining the similarity of programs. To date, the main application of Moss has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes. Since its development in 1994, Moss has been very effective in this role.
• Plagiarisma: An easy-to-use and free tool. You upload or copy and paste a portion of text and the site will provide you with Google search results of sources used in the material.
• Plagium: Can upload 5,000 characters and compare the sample to other uploaded files, perform a quick search, or use a deep search. For occasional searches it’s free, regular users must pay a nominal fee.
• Quetext: Quetext uses a complex algorithm to search for instances of plagiarism where work isn’t merely copied and pasted directly from another source. The program will show you exact matches, as well as results using a similar structure, all free of charge.