Turnitin support

The Turnitin plagiarism detection program is available to all subjects and faculties at the University of Melbourne. Turnitin is administered centrally by the Information Services, however the TLU provides assistance to staff within the Faculty. If staff would like to use Turnitin for their subjects but have not used the system previously, email Jennifer Shaw (shaj@unimelb.edu.au) or telephone 03 8344 4464 to arrange for an account to be created and to receive an introductory training session.

Submission process

Students are asked to submit their essays electronically, using the LMS assignment submission feature or our Assignment Tool program. Students must acknowledge that their submission will be screened by an electronic plagiarism checking tool before they can proceed to the submission screen. Students must also be warned verbally in the first lecture of the subject that a plagiarism checking tool will be used.

Staff can upload essays into Turnitin all at once using the batch upload facility available from the Turnitin website.

Essays uploaded into the system are usually processed quickly. For example, 1,000 essays take only around 10 minutes to process (although processing can slow down considerably when experiencing peak loads). Once processed, essays are placed into one of five colour-coded categories:

• Blue: No matched text (less than 20 words)
• Green: 0-24% matched text
• Yellow: 25-49% matched text
• Orange: 50-74% matched text
• Red: 75%+ matched text.

After processing, staff have access to an originality report for each essay. Originality reports are categorised into one of the above five categories and can be easily sorted in ascending and descending order, based on the level of plagiarism. Common practice is to process essays with the highest percentage of matched text through to a percentage which is deemed acceptable.

Note that time required to process originality of reports is significant, especially for subjects with large student enrolments, and additional resources may be required.

Guidelines and resources

The University of Melbourne has prepared an Academic Honesty website containing information related to the use of Turnitin. It also provides guidelines for dealing with students suspected of academic misconduct, and describes penalties where an allegation of academic misconduct has been upheld.

The University of Melbourne has developed University Policy and Procedures for Academic Misconduct. Guidelines on responding to academic misconduct and examples of responses to academic misconduct are available for University of Melbourne staff. (NOTE: It is necessary to log in using your Themis username and password to access this material.)