

In-text citations, bibliographies or reference lists.Common phrases and discipline-related terms.Areas of poor paraphrasing (referenced or not).The assessment question (because other students may have included it too).

The University cover sheet (there is no need to include this in a Turnitin submission).The similarity percentage simply indicates the proportion of material in the submission that can be found in other sources.

It is important to use your own academic judgment for each individual piece of work. It’s not about the number! The percentage of original writing will vary depending on the genre, subject matter, and parameters of the assessment. What is an acceptable percentage of matching text?
#TURNITIN SCORE MEANING HOW TO#
Qualitative academic judgement together with knowledge of particular subject areas is required prior to any judgements being reached.įor information on how to access a Similarity Report, please refer to the relevant FAQ. Matching text may represent legitimately cited references. Similarity Reports are merely tools which help identify sources containing text similar to submitted papers. Although a blue flag indicates a very low possibility of plagiarism, and a red flag indicates a very high possibility of plagiarism, Turnitin Similarity Reports may potentially include “false positives,” where common phrases or quoted materials are misidentified as possible incidents of academic misconduct.Turnitin does not identify plagiarism. These flag colors indicate the following:įaculty are strongly encouraged to review Similarity Reports in detail, rather than relying entirely on similarity scores. Turnitin assigns a colored flag to each Similarity Report. What do the colored flags next to each similarity score indicate?

Faculty using Turnitin are strongly encouraged to review Similarity Reports in detail, rather than relying only on the numeric score assigned. For example, an essay with a similarity score of 20% could include a long, uncited passage from another source, which would generally constitute plagiarism the same score could also indicate that the student had used similar phrases and sentence mechanics as other authors, in a way that did not indicate any academic integrity issues. However, even essays generating a low similarity score may still have problematic material. This report also includes a highlighted, color-coded version of the student’s original submission, showing which passages match other sources, and what those sources were.ĭetailed information on Similarity Reports is available from Turnitin Help: Interpreting the Similarity Report Does a high similarity score always indicate plagiarism? Does a low similarity score indicate that there was not any plagiarism?Ī very high number can indicate academic integrity issues. This is a percentage between 0-100%, indicating how much of a student’s written work matched text from other sources. For all work submitted using Turnitin, Turnitin generates a similarity score.
